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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 10 Mar 2011

grub-pc vs. grub-legacy in Debian Squeeze

As you can see in the previous entry, I was running my old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop with its recent Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade working well — except for one thing.

Grub2. Debian handled the upgrade well. It doesn’t remove the old Grub, now known as grub-legacy. Instead the old Grub gains an entry chainloading to Grub2, which is installed by the grub-pc package.

This way you can test Grub2 while still retaining Grub1. It’s a very nice way of doing what could be a system-breaking upgrade.

I can still boot from Grub1, but I can’t boot at all from Grub2. I made lots of temporary edits to the boot lines, but nothing I did enabled Grub2 to actually boot into Linux.

I’ll probably try again with Grub2; I wonder if a total reinstall would yield a bootable system.

But if things don’t start to break in Grub2’s favor, I’m perfectly willing to remove grub-pc and stick with grub-legacy.