About a week ago, topics around GRUB2 started to pop up on Gentoo Forums, I realized that GRUB2 just gets stabilized in Portage and it can also runs on no-multilib profile.

Updating anything regarding booting process is always a serious business, but I have little more confidence since I haven’t read anything disastrous on the forums. And the process took me just little over twenty minutes including reading time:

  • 2013-10-20T04:20:45Z: USE=-truetype, no need of fancy fonts. (media-fonts/unifont)

  • 2013-10-20T04:26:15Z: merged

  • 2013-10-20T04:27:09Z: grub2-install --grub-setup=/bin/true /dev/sda

  • 2013-10-20T04:28:20Z: grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    GRUB legacy uses conf, GRUB2 uses cfg:


    $ ll /boot/grub/menu.lst
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Apr 16  2009 /boot/grub/menu.lst -> grub.conf

  • 2013-10-20T04:29:55Z: chain load added, proceed to reboot

  • 2013-10-20T04:33:09Z: rebooted with GRUB2 via chain load successfully

  • 2013-10-20T04:34:30Z: grub2-install /dev/sda, installed GRUB2 onto MBR

  • 2013-10-20T04:37:17Z: emerge --depclean grub-static, so long GRUB legacy

  • 2013-10-20T04:40:17Z: booting again, just to make sure

  • 2013-10-20T04:42:42Z: done!

There is really nothing to talk about since it went through very smoothly. The only thing I actually did to change probably is the USE flag of truetype, barely seeing the GRUB2 screen, don’t think I need any fonts.

I could stay with GRUB Legacy as long as it’s still in Portage, but what I really like is grub-mkconfig and don’t have to update with IA32_EMULATION. It scans the kernel images and produces the grub.cfg automatically. No more manual editing or sed, simply run it and it’s done.