Re: grub configuration

[Martin_Doering@mn.man.de writes:]

>Yesterday in the evening I got vsta up and running the first time.

Congratulations! I know this isn't as easy as buying Windows 98 installed
on your laptop. :->

>I booted from floppy und used the first partition of my harddisk (fat16). I
>wrote all the kernel and module parameters directly in. There is a file
>"menu.lst" from grub which I copied to my HD to C:\boot\grub\menu.lst, but
>it was ignored. How can I use a menu, where I put in all the stuff? I
>found the dokumentation of grub very irritating for the beginner. The
>"new" Gnu Grub is not available in a production release.

Yes, and I really don't know exactly how to go forward on this. Make our
own GRUB documentation? Doesn't seem right. If any of you want to submit
documentation improvements to the GRUB project, that'd be very welcome on
this side. I assume they would use them!

Anyway, the way menu.lst gets used depends on the level 2 boot loader. This
should be located on your disk (usually in \boot\grub\stage2). When you use
the "install=" command to create a bootable disk, it does a LILO-style
record of the sector locations of the that file. I'm pretty sure that the
menu.lst comes from the same place as the stage2.

Does this mean you have to change the boot of your disk? No! You can do
the install= onto a *floppy*, but with the stage2 coming from your hard
disk. I've used this myself in cases where I didn't want to mess with the
boot of (usually somebody else's) PC. This exact case is covered in the
documentation.

>As I was on the console of vsta, I could use a few commands, but I
>recognized, that there are many differences between Linux/HP-UX/Minix and
>vsta. Especially the namer says nearly nothing to me and at first I have
>to come behind, how this works. It seems to be essential. ;-)

You don't need to worry too much about things like namer right off the bat.
Probably perusing the sample user accounts and then the header files in
/vsta/include is a good way to start.

>After this I would like to make some experiments. I never wrote some
>kernel or lowlevel stuff before. I just adopted a DOS GUI-Lib (PAL for the
>HP-LX Palmtop) to X11, but just used X11 primitives. So - I would like to
>see a GUI on VSTA, but I'm not shure, if I have the knowledge to do it
>myself?!? I will see...

See svgalib (vsta/bin/ports/svgalib) for a decent way to get down to the
low-level graphics layer.

Higher level is MGR, but from a graphics perspective it's pretty limited.

Regards,
Andy
Received on Thu Sep 21 07:07:04 2000