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A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

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Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#61

Post by costco »

kelnos wrote: post #55
costco wrote: post #54

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows): default=0 timeout=3 menuentry 'Custom Kernel' { insmod gzio if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='hd0,gpt6' echo 'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...…

Aside from the complexity of the autogenerated configuration file, is there any benefit to maintaining it yourself? I recall when I used to have a Windows partition, the 'update-grub' script included with Debian would find all kernels (including custom ones) and other OSes as well. I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

There's not really any benefit, I was just surprised that after deleting most of the lines it still worked.

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#62

Post by dspillett »

lights0123 wrote: post #51
dspillett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not something you could script up using https://help.gnome.org/users/zenity/3.32/password.html.en or similar?

That would require a full GTK installation in initramfs, which would be a bit heavy.

Ah, by GUI I assumed you meant something good indeed booted for hunting things like homes. For during the boot process for mounting an encrypted root, a TUI using something like dialog (https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html#screenshot and commonly available in Linux distributions standard repositories) would probably be more suited. IIRC it is what Debian use for their text installer. It should be pretty light weight, though it is still something you are scripting and adding to initramfs yourself so there may be more pre-made options that require less manual maintenance.

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#64

Post by gjs278 »

bravetraveler wrote: post #59
kelnos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the complexity of the autogenerated configuration file, is there any benefit to maintaining it yourself? I recall when I used to have a Windows partition, the 'update-grub' script included with Debian would find all kernels (including custom ones) and other OSes as well. I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

Ditto, I'm not really worried about the complexity of my GRUB config - just that it works. It tends to if I don't go poking/looking directly at it. Leaving them to manage the config has worked a-okay for me, even with a cmdline that would cause shudders in most. grubby has been a frustrating introduction If I were to invest any effort in my bootloader at all, it would be to get closer to the 'metal' through systemd-b…

[dead]

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#65

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

costco wrote: post #54

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows): default=0 timeout=3 menuentry 'Custom Kernel' { insmod gzio if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='hd0,gpt6' echo 'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...…

Man I miss good old GRUB, which I guess is called GRUB legacy now? Most entries only required 4-5 lines of config and there was no ugly shell syntax, a million options, conditionals etc.

Probably just because I grew up with it, but MBR and disk/boot management on Linux was so much simpler back then.

512 bytes of partition table + bootloader(well, the bootstrapping part anyway). Partitions had one simple, 3 character name in /dev. No weird FAT32 partitions full of mysterious files, UEFI stuffed full of unnecessary features, but you can be damn sure a desktop or laptop board is gonna provide all the ones that make your life harder, and none of the actually useful ones.

I'm sure there are lots of good technical reasons why everything needs a UUID now, and so on and so forth, but none of all this complexity solved any problem I actually had in the before times. It just added the problem of now having to read a buttload of documentation every time I even think about touching this stuff.

At some point a few years back, I wanted to switch DNS servers on my laptop running some ubuntu derivative at the time. resolv.conf was still there, so I edited it. Nothing happened. Eventually I ended up finding like 4 different files in various places specifying DNS. And only one was the right one to change. Others might do nothing or actually break DNS.

One of these days I'll probably throw up my hands, put my mobo in legacy mode, and install some bare bones, Systemd free distro. Maybe Crux Linux or Slackware if those even exist still.

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#66

Post by rodgerd »

kelnos wrote: post #55
costco wrote: post #54

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows): default=0 timeout=3 menuentry 'Custom Kernel' { insmod gzio if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='hd0,gpt6' echo 'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...…

Aside from the complexity of the autogenerated configuration file, is there any benefit to maintaining it yourself? I recall when I used to have a Windows partition, the 'update-grub' script included with Debian would find all kernels (including custom ones) and other OSes as well. I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

> I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

The pain point is that when you can't boot for some reason, grub2 is significantly harder to reason about and fix than classic grub, lilo, systemd-boot, and so on.

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#67

Post by versteegen »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #65
costco wrote: post #54

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows): default=0 timeout=3 menuentry 'Custom Kernel' { insmod gzio if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='hd0,gpt6' echo 'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...…

Man I miss good old GRUB, which I guess is called GRUB legacy now? Most entries only required 4-5 lines of config and there was no ugly shell syntax, a million options, conditionals etc. Probably just because I grew up with it, but MBR and disk/boot management on Linux was so much simpler back then. 512 bytes of partition table + bootloader(well, the bootstrapping part anyway). Partitions had one simple, 3 character…

I'm using Slackware-current with manually maintained [edit: actually, I wrote a python script to generate it, see other comment] grub.cfg (grub 2.06) on a MBR system, and happy I don't have GPT. Recently I tried to convert a Windows installation from MBR to GPT. What a disaster, never doing that again (but if you do need to, use gdisk [1]. It's great, I had unrelated issues). I suppose I'll eventually have to convert my Linux PC to GPT when replacing the motherboard. I haven't ever reinstalled Slackware (I just upgrade), since switching to it in 2007. Honestly there are issues with that.

Slackware just celebrated its 30 year anniversary two days ago [2] and still going strong without systemd ;) Well actually it now has eudev, which is the small unintrusive part of systemd which a lot of software these days has as a dependency. Everything is still done with rc files. Best of both worlds.

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/mbr2gpt.html

[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/thirty-years-86196804 (There's nothing on the website or announce mailing list)

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#68

Post by versteegen »

kelnos wrote: post #55
costco wrote: post #54

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows): default=0 timeout=3 menuentry 'Custom Kernel' { insmod gzio if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='hd0,gpt6' echo 'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...…

Aside from the complexity of the autogenerated configuration file, is there any benefit to maintaining it yourself? I recall when I used to have a Windows partition, the 'update-grub' script included with Debian would find all kernels (including custom ones) and other OSes as well. I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

Well I wish I didn't have to, but I ended up writing a small python script [1] to generate my grub.cfg boot entries (After 8 years I've forgotten many of the reasons for doing so). At least it's clearly inspectable and I can make customisations that won't be erased by regeneration. For example my root partition is a btrfs subvolume, but how does grub know which subvolume I want mounted as the root? The current one I assume, but what about my backup root on my HDD which isn't mounted? Or which alternative kernels in /boot?

[1] https://gist.github.com/rversteegen/32bb0b2786ee1092762627f0...

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#69

Post by dspillett »

dspillett wrote: post #62
lights0123 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require a full GTK installation in initramfs, which would be a bit heavy.

Ah, by GUI I assumed you meant something good indeed booted for hunting things like homes. For during the boot process for mounting an encrypted root, a TUI using something like dialog ( https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html#screenshot and commonly available in Linux distributions standard repositories) would probably be more suited. IIRC it is what Debian use for their text installer. It should be pretty l…

(hunting -> mounting - didn't notice until the edit option has expired)

Re: A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

#70

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

dm319 wrote: post #43
jamesfmilne wrote: post #17

On Rocky Linux 8, I had to change GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT to "gfxterm", then it would pickup the GRUB_THEME value. My kid uses Grub all the time to reboot into Windows to play Minecraft Bedrock Edition, this will boggle his mind.

My kids use the Linux bedrock launcher (unofficial). It's often a bit behind the latest release, but it runs much smoother than on Windows IMO. https://github.com/minecraft-linux/appimage-builder/releases...

The only thing I don't like is your render distance is drastically limited. Under Linux I can only set it to 12 (I believe), whereas in Windows I can go all the way out to 51 if I so choose (which is useful when looking for end cities).
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