Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Grub2 and gdm harder to configure

GDM offers the login screen. Was easy to adjust, now from Karmic it is impossible to create your own login, then this NewWave theme was my favourite. But now I couldn't get it installed.

The same problem with grub2. Options to configure are much more complicated. Herman who has made his wonderful Dual Boot Pages is very positive about the new grub, so we mustn' t be too grubby about it but still it is annoying to experience some knowledge is getting old stuff so fast. Here you 'll find a good manual on grub2; it's quite complicated to edit as will find out.
And with nastu little differences to grub legacy:

Critical! GRUB 2 uses PARTITION notation that starts with 1 and not 0 like GRUB legacy! This is terribly important to remember!

The menu. lst in /boot/grub was easy to adapt in grub legacy, with a triple boot it is much more complicated to configure. So I first made a dual boot after the default Win 7 install the Akoya came with. I installed Crunchbang 9.04 which still has the legacy grub. After that I installed Karmic 9.10 64 bits. Placed during install (advanced options at the end of the install options) the grub2 bootloader in its own 9.10 root partition. Great article on Grub Legacy.

So 'sudo blkid' gives me:
/dev/sda1: UUID="5A7C8DBA7C8D9205" LABEL="System Reserved" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: UUID="82E89692E89683D7" LABEL="Boot" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda3: UUID="744C39344C38F30A" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda6: UUID="0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda7: UUID="0ac9883f-4f11-4da4-b1df-d58fe7bbd7f8" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda8: UUID="7d70dc37-8189-4b58-93c6-d437467a5a5c" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda9: UUID="cd31ef33-e386-4fb4-9c05-4c789cfcf727" TYPE="ext4"


This information is important when editing my menu.lst:
Sda6 is my Crunchbang install, there the grub bootloader has to find it's menu.lst.
As you can see the uuid are specified and sda6 is designated as hd0,5 ; sda8 as hd0,7.
Sda9 is the separate home partition. The swap partition, sda7 is shared by Karmic and Crunchbang:

## ## End Default Options ##

splashimage=(hd0,5)/boot/grub/splashimages/1.xpm.gz

title CrunchBang, kernel 2.6.28-18-generic
uuid 0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-18-generic root=UUID=0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-18-generic
quiet

title CrunchBang, kernel 2.6.28-18-generic (recovery mode)
uuid 0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-18-generic root=UUID=0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-18-generic

title CrunchBang, kernel 2.6.28-13-generic
uuid 0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-13-generic
quiet

title CrunchBang, kernel 2.6.28-13-generic (recovery mode)
uuid 0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-13-generic

title CrunchBang, memtest86+
uuid 0d7ae409-9094-4e8b-b300-b8d882726de7
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Windows Vista (loader)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
chainloader +1


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda3
title Windows Vista (loader)
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
savedefault
chainloader +1

title Ubuntu 9.10 kernel 2.6.31-19-generic
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic root=UUID=7d70dc37-8189-4b58-93c6-d437467a5a5c ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic
savedefault
boot

title Ubuntu 9.10 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic root=UUID=7d70dc37-8189-4b58-93c6-d437467a5a5c ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic
savedefault
boot

To end a great article howto add and make your own spalsh images.

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