GNU GRUB 1.97 has just been released.
This release of GRUB is a significant breakthrough compared to GRUB 1.96. Among a long list of improvements, GRUB 1.97 includes support for booting the kernels of FreeBSD, OpenBSD
and NetBSD, it detects the Ext4 filesystem which is commonly used with the kernel Linux, and it implements a robust mechanism for booting from GPT drives, by embedding itself in the BIOS Boot partition.
I read that Vladimir Serbinenko’s effort to bring GRUB to the Lemote Yeeloong laptop has reached a milestone: It is now able to initialize and draw text in the display:
This is quite significant for GNU GRUB as it’s the first time it’s ported to a mipsel platform. In addition, it is planned to support the Yeeloong both as a “disk bootloader” (i.e. the way it is normally used on x86/PC) and as a “firmware bootloader”, thereby offering a more flexible alternative to PMON2000 (the preinstalled firmware).
The Lemote Yeeloong is a legacy-free, mipsel-based laptop that runs using entirely free software, including the firmware and its initialization routines.
We’ve recently made available an experimental branch of GRUB, using GNU Bazaar.
Although it is currently identical to SVN trunk (the codebase that will lead to GRUB 1.97), we plan to use it as staging area for different kinds of experimental work, which would benefit from user testing so that it becomes more mature before it is merged into our main tree.
My appreciation goes to Vladimir who kindly volunteered to be the person in charge of this branch, and I’m confident he will do a great job.
Insightful quote of the day:
Not that I’d ever claim that the BIOS is wonderful either, but at least everybody knows that the BIOS is just a bootloader, and doesn’t try to make it anything else.
— Linus Torvalds (in reference to EFI)
I couldn’t agree more. Notice that GRUB is a bootloader too, and argueably a better one than BIOS. If we’re looking for a replacement to old legacy BIOS, why not use something modern and flexible instead?
EFI is just the repetition of the same design mistakes, which the industry already rejected, using a less obsolete instruction set. Today’s legacy i8086 realmode is tomorrow’s legacy ia32/amd64. Are we going to fall for it?
GNU GRUB 1.97 beta1 is out. Give it a shot!
Finally, proof that there’s a secret pact between Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Intel and Yahoo. This was in my mailbox today morning:
You are receiving this e-mail because you subscribed to Intel Featured Offers Sun Microsystems respects your privacy. If you do not wish to receive this IBM Featured Offers e-mail, please click the “Unsubscribe” link below. This will not unsubscribe you from e-mail communications from third-party advertisers that may appear in MSN Feature Offers. This shall not constitute an offer by MSN. Yahoo shall not be responsible or liable for the advertisers’ content nor any of the goods or service advertised.
Just a quick note to mention that Pavel Roskin and I have been appointed maintainers for GNU GRUB. We will share the burden of GRUB maintenance with Marco Gerards and Yoshinori Okuji-san, who in recent times have had very little time to dedicate to GRUB matters.
Feel free to send us your condolences :-)
Maybe you’ve heard of this recent statement from Linus Torvalds. It goes like this:
I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.
People tend to focus in the first paragraph, which I find by far the least relevant. I mean, of course hatred is a disease. And it’s really nothing specific to Microsoft. But let’s read on:
There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.”
This is where Linus’ goes intimate. One could say it is intentional, but I see it more as a kind of slip. You see, in Torvalds’ mind, if you speak about free software instead of open source, there’s this danger that they will associate you with exclusion and hatred! His view of the world is very simple and straightforwarded: Either you completely avoid the freedom rethoric, or you’re full of hate.
In Torvalds’ mind it’s not conceivable that one could care about freedom out of love and not hate. It’s not conceivable that one could stand to defend his and everyone else’s rights out of compassion, without hating the person who would take them away. That is the view of an extremist.
It’s very unfortunate that people pay so much attention to Torvalds, as if he was some kind of visionary. Reality is that he’s just a very skilled hacker with delusions of grandeur and complete carelessness about ethics or morality.
Sometimes you hate a bug so much that when you fix it you have to blog about it.
GRUB for Sparc just landed in Debian Sid. I’m looking for victim users who want to screw thei test it and report how well it worked for them.
Thoughts of undetermined usefulness 