Grub installation. First potential Fedora killer

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 13, 2014, at 12:56 AM, Jean François Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> It is refreshing to see I am not alone.  Grub2 has the syndrome of "developpers becaming infatuated and not hiving a hoot about erfs err, I meant users".  

In a sense, they're right, because they're making something that users shouldn't have to get involved in or be experts at. You're not going to get a lot of warm fuzzies at that level. They're making something for the distributions to leverage rather than everyone having their own free for all. Boot is difficult to solve because users in F/OSS don't like being told their use case is insane, and that there are maybe a handful of "best practices".

Fedora maybe should establish a booting committee to come up with sane best practices and make recommendations to anaconda for what to build if it isn't already built; to remove what's nutty; for docs to document alternatives that aren't going to get development attention; and to QA for scope on testing so they know how things are intended to work so they know what's a bug, how bad it is, whether it's a blocker, etc. QA spends shitloads of time dealing with boot related bugs and how things out to work.

It'd be nice if this could be coordinated with other distros but the reality is they're still way too hungry for eating each other's young. So at best maybe they get their own house in order.

> 
>> Is this computer by any chance UEFI firmware based? Or is it BIOS? That matters.
>> 
> 
> BIOS.  GPT partitionning.

That should be rather straightforward, os-prober should find your other OS's and add them to the grub menu. Are you using LUKS for CentOS? I remember recently trying this during Fedora 20 testing where I installed Fedora 20 after CentOS in qemu-kvm and I did get a CentOS entry in the grub menu.


> 
> In fact I was hinting about the need of a boot configurator in Fedora.  If user had somethig in the menus named "Boot manager" then the subject would 
> just be minor annoyance.  But now a user who doesn't know about Grub2 
> intrincacies just sees he is trapped and there is no way to escape.


A GUI program would not fix your problem. If os-prober isn't finding your CentOS install, a GUI boot manager wouldn't either. I suggest filing a bug and attaching the following;

existing grub.cfg
grub2-install --debug /dev/sda   #this will reinstall GRUB, but produces very verbose output that should be captured to a file and attached
bash -x grub2-mkconfig     #this will show some light debug output for the script that creates grub.cfg without overwriting the existing grub.cfg

The results from this script:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/

Run that either in CentOS or Fedora. But whichever one you don't run it it, also separately post the fstab for that system.

You can file the bug against os-prober for now as that's the most likely culprit and then post the bug URL to this thread.

Chris Murphy