Fedora tested in c't: grub missing feature

[Ben Boeckel]

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Christoph Höger wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> fedora has recently been tested (again) and compared against other
> distributions (Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) by c't, a german IT magazine from
> the heise publishing house.
> 
> Among other criticisms one thing was really annoying: When a user
> installs fedora on a machine with windows installed (common use case) it
> detects that installation and offers to add it to grub. But installing
> fedora on a box with an already present linux distro installation will
> yield that installation removed from grub.
> 
> I understand that the bootloader is a part of the distro and its
> configuration gets changed e.g. during kernel updates, but is there
> really only the answer to remove one distribution completely?
> Do we really want to support Windows as second OS more than 
OpenSUSE or
> Ubuntu (or CentOS, or Debian, or Gentoo, or ........)
> At least the anaconda team should consider printing a warning about one
> OS going to "be lost" during install and how to recover.
> 
> Any thoughts on that?

This may be more for grub upstream, but what if grub could create a menu 
given different files to work with. Fedora installs /boot/grub/fedora.lst, 
OpenSuSE installs opensuse.lst, and so on. This way multi-boot systems can 
handle as many distros as needed/wanted and not have them step on each 
other fighting for control of menu.lst and its formatting. Then menu.lst 
could be used for common things (such as which to make the default, 
timeout, splash, and other settings). Then create a tool to manage the 
common file settings. It would only require the user to make sure that /boot 
is large enough for kernels and the same for all distros. I think this would 
be an easier solution than figuring out a common format for all distros to 
use and making sure that they don't step on each others' toes.

- --Ben

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