Apparently, though unproven, at 22:51 on Sunday 09 January 2011, Dale did opine thusly:
> Alan McKinnon wrote: > > It's trying to be an OS that's a bootloader as it's primary function. > > > > Think back to the days of lilo. It obviously isn't an OS and doesn't > > understand OS concepts - it loads an OS. When that step is done, then and > > only then do OS concepts come into play. lilo doesn't even understand > > how to find a file on a disk, that's why the lilo command had to be run > > to tell the bootloader which sectors on disk it had to shove into > > memory. > > > > This confused people. It annoyed even more people who often forgot to run > > lilo before rebooting. So grub came along, it had the absolute minimum > > of OS-like features to find and load a kernel file. It needed it's own > > syntax of defining drive names, then would make it's way through the > > read-only fs it found there to find the kernel. It supported a small > > number of file systems, just enough so that a 50M partition would be > > usable on almost any platform. > > > > grub2 now looks like GNU/grub (sarcasm intended). It's not a bootloader, > > it's a puny OS with one extra feature - it can bootload! > > > > It has support for jpeg, every fs under the sun, and the grub2 ebuild > > even has a truetype USE flag. > > > > Yes! Now my life is complete. I've been DYING for years to have a > > bootloader that can properly display anti-aliased fonts for the entire 2 > > seconds it's on- screen > > Well, I have to say that for the moment, the old grub is working fine > here. Just like ntp, that may change next week. I just wonder how much > longer it will take before they get it stabilized and expect everyone to > switch to it? From my understanding, they are not doing much with the > old grub now so it should be to far off. > > I don't like to think about the old lilo days. Bad memories. Reminds > me of xorg and hal. o_O At least you didn't have to deal with booting linux off a floppy -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
