Feature Suggestions (3)

[John Doe]

   I've used your bootloader for a long time and I must say that GRUB 
legacy is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used. However, 
this has only made me raise my expectations even higher. I'm not sure if 
this would be the correct  venue to report feature suggestions for GRUB 
2, but I could find no other.
   That aside, here are some features that I have longed for while 
using GRUB legacy that I would enjoy seeing in GRUB 2:
   *
   Dummy Menu Entries* The GRUB menu is very customizable, and with the 
splashimage and gfxmenu patches can be very pretty. Because of this, I 
enjoyed making a boot menu with a title and blank spaces before the 
operating system list and then another space before the halt and reboot 
options I placed. However, since there is no option to make dummy menu 
entries (the title) or to skip a line (the space) I would usually have 
menu.lst something like this:

title Boot Menu #substitute for a title entry

title _ #substitute for a space/skip

title Linux OS
root (hdx,y)

title Another OS
root (hdx,z)

title _ #substitute for a skip/space

title Restart
reboot

title Shut Down
halt

Although my complaint is completely aesthetic, (it's not the end of the 
world when I press enter on an underscore and get some ugly error screen 
forcing me to press any key to return to my work of art), considering 
your feature list for Google Summer of Code includes aesthetics, I think 
implementing dummy entries and line skips could go a long way to making 
a more attractive bootloader menu.

   *Support for Fat32 Partitions* This is probably not a very important 
feature request, but in my spare time I downloaded the AdvanceCD Linux 
Distribution (http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html) and 
installed it into a small unused partition. Unfortunately, it formats a 
partition  installation fat32. So even though there is no bootloader, 
even when I told GRUB the kernel and the initrd. I got error #12 or 13 
(I do not remember which, if not 17), and when I went to a GRUB prompt 
and entered root (hd0,5) #the installation partition# and the output is 
"filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83". If this error could be 
avoided in GRUB 2.

   *Boot CD Support* I use bootable CD's quickly, whether to install an 
operating system, to repartition my hard drive, or fix errors without 
needing to find some way of booting into the broken system. However, so 
far as I know, GRUB legacy has no capability of booting from a CD/DVD 
drive when installed on a hard drive. This is a slight nuisance as my 
only options are to restart the system or use GRUB to load the Smart 
Boot Manager to boot from the optical drive. (A how-to can be found 
here:http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Chainloading_a_bootable_CD-ROM_from_GRUB.)

   Thank you for reading this lengthy email (assuming you have). I 
appreciate you spending your time reading my suggestions which very well 
may mean nothing to you. If any one of these features made it into GRUB 
2, I would be ecstatic!