Re: Usability bugs which aren't bugs?

[Jago Pearce]

Thanks, that clears a lot up.

Fixed it with:
ln -s /boot/grub/grub.cfg /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Don't know why I had to do that. It's a shame grub doesn't show where
it is reading it's grub.cfg from especially when it can't find one
(resulting in confusion and a blank menu).

To help find it less confusing I'm thinking of:
- trying to remove the sys-boot/grub-1.98 my distro has installed
along with 2.00
- removing OS Prober, not using menugen and writing grub.cfg by hand.
Because the default entry relies on the boot order os-prober messes
this up and also adds extra stages to diagnose)

Grub seems a bit over engineered for a linux/Windows dualboot compared
to Lilo which I suppose is why Lilo saw some redevelopment in 2010...
but it would require me to learn LVM and crypt stuff again and this
way I'm learning.

I started to think about why I find grub so confusing. Here's what I
wrote. Just consider it feedback from another point of view and with a
pinch of salt because I could be wrong about it all. This is going
offtopic now for help-grub:

---

- os-prober. Good idea but people are then not sure whether to use it
or to do things manually since the default boot option relies on it's
position in the menu
- /etc/grub.d is a problem for those who don't know bash
- it took me longer than expected to find that chmod +x / -x for
/etc/grub.d/ scripts is a nice way to manage them... how did I miss
this info, am I stupid? I think yes I am stupid but it would be nice
if I could be stupid and still be able to use linux (for example)
- favouring info online. Often you'll find docs that appear to be for
grub2 but then you read on and find they are for grub2. grub2 online
seems to be much sparser. A trick here I found was to stick with
distribution docs
- differing approaches to grub versions by different distributions?
- trying to have a approach which is independent to what O/S is
installed... yet being so linked to linux it's hard to imagine what a
grub setup without linux would be like. In fact, seeing a non unix
grub setup would probably be a good way to understand it
- having grub legacy installed as well as grub2
example on my Sabayon (Gentoo with overlay) system:

sys-boot/grub-0.97-r22 (not installed)
sys-boot/grub-1.98 (installed... can't seem to remove)
sys-boot/grub-2.00
sys-boot/grub-handler (Sabayon specific... I wonder what this is...
will have to investigate)

So I will nuke 1.98 and hopefully that will help make things clearer.

I'm getting there. After the blank menu problem I was able to boot
into my encrypted, LVM setup. What's interesting is that my distro
allowed me to set this up on install very easily with no knowledge of
LVM or cryptsetup. When I made my grub mistake. I then had to learn
those in order to do the init=/bin/bash etc boot trick recovery,
learning another 4 or 5 extra steps along the way.

 It's a good example of automagic vs detailed knowledge. Both are not
great in that if we do something fully automatically we can have a
user who doesn't understand what is happening. Conversely, if we have
everything manually done it can be hard to empathise with new users
because we know how to do it and the knowledge gap is that much
bigger.
 I prefer the approach of automagic tools documenting what they are
doing. Ideally it should be logging what it has done in such a way
that a user can duplicate what it doe

There was no warning that the grub menu would be blank. I'm still not
sure how it happened.

I've learnt a lot along the way. The important thing is that I don't
forget what it's like to *not* know things because I need to view
things as a new users to know how that new experience is for people.

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 3:19 AM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:
> В Wed, 9 Jan 2013 19:36:20 +0000
> Jago Pearce <address@hidden> пишет:
>
>> Are these bugs?
>> I notice it's common in technical projects such as grub that
>> useability is often the non-bug, since you can argue that it's not a
>> bug. Is this the case here?
>> Let's be honest, grub2 is a much bigger learning curve from the days Lilo.
>>
>> I thought I'd mail here first to discuss and check before jumping in
>> with bugzilla.
>>
>> 1) In CLI mode you should be able to pass "kernel" to boot rather than
>> just "linux".
>
> Which kernel? Linux kernel? *BSD kernel? HURD kernel? OS/X kernel?
> Windows kernel? GRUB2 can load any of them and each has own
> requirements how to do it so GRUB2 needs know which one is being
> loaded.
>
>>
>> 2) grub2-install gives no output. In my case somehow it had written a
>> blank menu to my bootsector.
>
> GRUB2 never writes any menu to bootsector. Usually grub-install is
> careful enough and will abort with explanation message unless it is
> absolutely sure grub2 can really be installed. So more information is
> needed here.
>
>
>



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