On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 16:40, Rajko M. wrote:
The "mess" of multiple boot menus is actually the only fair solution with reasonable maintenance and development cost.
There is grub, grub2, lilo, BSD, Windows and any other OS specific boot loader that I have no idea it exists. Combine that with all kernel names and versions, initrd names and versions, default disk layouts, default configurations and user customizations (and errors). Number of combinations that boot loader installer has to handle grows very fast.
Making all of them to appear in the openSUSE grub correctly is not always possible, and even when it is, it can be very complicated and error prone process, or better to say guesswork of "his masters mind".
The only problem with openSUSE approach is that not every OS (distro) is configured to do the same; take care to boot itself correctly, and let the rest boot trough their own boot loaders, making users confused which approach is correct.
And yet... up to 11.1, openSUSE did find other installed OSes, and did set up other bootable OSes correctly (in my experience).... and we had Grub, Lilo, BSD, Windows, etc., etc. (The only new bit in this scenario, that I am aware of, is Grub2). Yes, there is no argument that anything to do with booting and configuring Grub is complex, but... I still have yet to see a single answer to this problem that takes into account the fact that openSUSE did somehow manage do set up Grub with multiple boot partitions in the past, and that other Linux Distros still seem to be able to manage it right now. Sure, experts can go and reconfigure Grub or Grub2, or even switch over to Lilo if they want... yet the Ubuntu user who comes along and installs openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3 to check it out, all of a sudden seems to "lose" their previous Ubuntu since it's now missing from the boot menu they get when they start up their computer. Fixing this means they have to know how to add their Ubuntu install back into Grub. Assume you install the other way around though and install Ubuntu on a system that already has openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3 installed and whiz bang, you get the Ubuntu Grub (if you take default settings) with openSUSE 11.2/11.3 right there in the menu. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org