Today I decided to resurrect an old piece of hardware I’ve had sitting useless for a while: an Asus Eee PC 1005PE.
As an experiment, and to pave the way for future experimentation I decided to use GRUB2. I’m also trying out the no-multilib profile, so grub 0.xx is not supported.
I’m pleased to report that using GRUB2 on a normal, BIOS booting system was extremely easy. Here’s some information about how I did it.
Partition Table
I’m using a single EXT4 partition, the simplest possible setup.
pebble ~ # cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed); notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail / tail freely.
#
# The root filesystem should have a pass number of either 0 or 1.
# All other filesystems should have a pass number of 0 or greater than 1.
#
# See the manpage fstab(5) for more information.
#
# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>
# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/sda1 / ext4 noatime 0 1
Installation
I installed Gentoo’s GRUB 2.00-rc1 package.
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Setup
Since I’m using the standard make install to install kernel images to /boot, simply running grub2-mkconfig sets everything up:
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That’s it! While there’s more going on behind the scenes than GRUB1’s simple grub.cfg file, in the case of a BIOS driven setup, everything Just Works.