preupgrade grub2 failed: now can't boot

[Tim]

On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 12:25 -0700, don fisher wrote:
> 3. Why do they force a boot partition? As far as I know using /boot
> has worked since Fedora2.

Because the boot process can only start from certain filing systems,
it's more restricted than other things.  But the system, once booted,
can make use of better filing systems.  And it does use a better one, by
default.

Also, *some* computers can only boot from the low cylinders on the disc,
this issue has *always* been the case.  With a boot partition, it's
relatively easy to always ensure that the boot partition is readable by
the BIOS.  But when boot is just files in /, then they could be placed
anywhere in the disc, including unreadable places.  Even if the system
was initially bootable, that's no guarantee that your system can
continue to boot up without a boot partition.  Any updates that get
installed might put newer files that are used by the boot processes into
an unreadable location.

> 4. Why is the starting group number 1000? I was assigned the ID/group
> of 239 back in 1994. All of my systems know me by that number, which
> is very convenient when you NFS mount many disks. I
> exited /etc/login.defs to allow 239 and have had many mysterious
> problems. system-config-users does not appear to work!

How did you manage that?  As far as I know, the default lowest ID for
users has been 500, since the early Red Hat Linux days, long before
Fedora existed.  So, in the normal run of things, you'd have to have
manually selected that ID, you wouldn't get assigned it.

There's a division that regards IDs below 500 as being system users, and
above 499 as actual users, and treats them differently in various ways,
some of which *might* cause you a problem if you try to do something
different.

Other distros use 1000 as the dividing line.  And now Fedora is falling
into line with them, for consistency's sake across all *ix distros.  Not
that I can forsee a need for 999 system users, but then I do not do any
large scale kind of computing (e.g. lots of services installed for lots
of users).

> Is there a place where the logic for these changes would be
> documented? 

The release notes, as each release comes out...?

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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