Some time ago I wrote about the
the state of GRUB2
and a milestone on getting it boot my Apple PowerBook G4 without manual
intervention. More than a year later, GRUB2 has changed and improved a lot,
as the community keeps growing and patches and ideas are continously being
posted.
Some months and commits after my previous post, GRUB broke again on
Apple OpenFirmware and I'd get dropped to OF console, the amount of
commits since the last known working version and the current SVN was quite
big, and although I was able to narrow it to a few suspicious changes, I had
no time to bisect it properly, and sadly I had to go back to
yaboot for a while.
But procrastinating sometimes helps, and when I should have been writing
and studying, on December I gave GRUB a new try on my laptop to see if a few
important changes to memory allocation would have changed anything. And it did!
So after fighting quite a few problems, I was able to
report partial success
to
grub-devel.
Again, getting GRUB installed correctly was a bit challenging and needed
some hackery, due to incorrectly generated
device.map, and the
linux module mysteriously not getting loaded. Luckily, Michel D nzer found out
that this was due to a bug in sort ordering in the HFS module, which broke
the lookup of files with underscores like
_linux.mod, and for
which he posted a possible fix by taking Linux's table of character
ordering, which is a blob of hex values.
GRUB developers didn't seem too happy about applying the patch:
they argument that a blob like that should be well documented or written
in some other more readable way, and there's a possible problem with the mix
of Linux GPLv2 and GRUB GPLv3+ codebases, if a table of data like what Michel
posted is actually copyrightable. The discussion ended up dying and nothing
was done... until Pavel Roskin
picked it up
weeks later and posted a new patch, based on
hfsutils GPLv2+
code, which addressed these issues. The new patch seems to have a few issues,
which makes it fail as before, but hopefully it'll be fixed soon.
Additionally, I wasn't able to boot using UUIDs as the search commands
fails to detect the correct boot device on my system (but not on Michel's), so
I had to disable that in
/etc/default/grub.
To workaround the linux module loading bug while the patch is fixed,
I just added this ugly hack to
/etc/grub.d/09_local_prelinux:
#! /bin/sh -e
# Work-around for bugs in the hfs module which makes the load of
# linux.mod fail.
cat << EOF
insmod (hd,3)/usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/_linux.mod
insmod linux
EOF
This is enough to get the
initrd and
linux
commands available. However, update-grub will still add
search
commands to your menu entries even if you disabled UUID support; I can't
understand why, but I know it breaks on my PowerBook due to some OF rarety.
Just removing the line from the menu entry will leave me with a working
config that boots without any manual editing at GRUB prompt.
The latest GRUB snapshot in Debian fixes the device.map issue, but adds
one last
issue:
update-grub will fail due to some gfxterm detection code, a workaround is
to replace an
exit 1 with
exit 0 when this happens
in
/etc/grub.d/00_header.
On the weird architectures front, it's worth noting that this month
Dave Miller popped up on the list and started posting patches to fix the rotten
SPARC port, and I think it's safe to assume that it'll be on an usable state
really soon. Impressive!
...awesome.
OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many
things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one
blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk
about hacking, running and sightseeing...:)
Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for
being there in US, isn't it?
I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in
seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it:
I guess having only the Japanese version of 
by Michael Parenti. It seems that Caesar was more of a populist than a despot.
Debconf11
This evening, the final decision on which city will host Debconf11 next
year
will be taken.
For the last half year, mostly Andreas Barth, Jan-Marek Glogowski and
I
have been working hard to make the Munich bid as good as possible. One
thing we wanted to make clear from the beginning was that we would go for
a conference in the city center - not some conference center in some
nearby village or in an industrial area far away from where the city life
happens.
It was not easy, since the german-wide decision, we had to reshuffle
venue
plans a couple of times.
In the end, thanks to Jan-Marek, we managed to get an excellent
venue
offer. Our bid consits mostly of:
Shockingly, I seem to have found a woman crazy enough to like me!
This delusion looks like it might be long-term; let's see how it
goes... :-)
I got 
And here are the three blogger friends I can think of who aren't too uptight and full of themselves to post a picture of a hand-drawn bunny:
Cormac and Caoimhe at a patisserie with Chocolate lion in Concarneau, Brittany
.
The weather was fairly good: two wet days (though not overly so, compared to what we're used to in Galway); enough to give the
'authentic camping experience'. And for the children especially, just warm enough. Long drives South were not an option with young kids,
and we wanted to see Carnac and Brittany in general.
We went touring to two places: Mont St. Michel, on the way down, Carnac, and locally around Quimper and Concarneau.
At seven, Cormac is beginning to be old enough to enjoy this, but Sadhbh at 2 is too young, and easily aggravated.
Caoimhe can appreciate some of it, such as the well recommended Breton museum in Quimper, seeing the local costumes and clothing is
just her style at the moment. We're looking forward to going back when the kids are older, or we can enjoy touring on our own.
The camp site is dominated by English / Dutch / Irish. It is still term-time in Britain and Ireland, which meant the children on the site
was full of 2-4 year-olds, with a shortage of playmates for Cormac. Next time, synchronise with English school times, etc.
We went during Cormacs term-time because it was much cheaper (1000 Euro) than high-season. If Cormac was having difficulty in school
things would have been different, as it is, we had no qualms in doing so. Things will probably be different next year with Caoimhe
also in school at the same time, and we would go later. Suffice it to say I think synchonisation of school timetables is a bad idea,
as it has led to these huge price differentials and parents taking their kids from school. As a friend with experience of
the French school system points out, they've spent the last 40 years desynchronising their timetables ...
So would we go again, or buy our own tents, etc? possibly. The brochure for next year arrived already, with large discounts for
booking early ...
Many 
