What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

If you have used Mac OS (classic or X) you may not have used Startup Disk, but if you have ever have you know how essential it is. Well, Linux users are much more likely using multiple operating systems, but their bootloader, GRUB, is slightly… lacking.

There’re two parts to a bootloader: figuring out what can be booted, and letting the user select which of those bootable things to… boot. Startup Disk rocks at both of these. GRUB sucks at both of these.

On Mac OS, you press the power button and you’re booted into an OS. If you want to change which OS you boot into you open up Startup Disk, select the OS you want from the auto-generated list, and reboot. You can also hold down the option key at boot and select from a dynamic OS list which can include Firewire drives, DVD-ROMs, and USB drives. It even has little icons for each bootable OS. Each OS you boot into knows about the others, and your settings can be set from any one.

On Linux (every one I’ve used anyway) you boot to a text menu every time, and must select an OS, or the “default” will boot after a time period. This list is not dynamic, it is specified in a file called “menu.lst”. If the entries in the list are not correct, booting will fail. Users must hand-write this file, so at least one entry will be incorrect more often than not. Worse, because this process is manual, each OS has its own copy of this file. If GRUB is run from one OS with correct entries, then a second OS with incorrect entries, the incorrect entries will prevail. This has happened to me on several occasions.

If GRUB isn’t going to do the dirty work of figuring out how to boot, could it at least give me a GUI to make the entries list and check it twice? Even a text UI that listed possible boot partitions / kernel paths and actually validated that I wasn’t doing something brain-dead would be nice.

As goes with all complaining about open source, yes, I know that if I want to, I could fix it. It seems like the GRUB team is trying to, but will it end up being as simple yet functional as good old Startup Disk? Is there some “secret” of GRUB that I just haven’t found yet? Does LILO do all of this and butter my toast? If you know, let me know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Linux, Nerd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.