grub enhancements

[John Richard Moser]

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The 0.8 series of Gnoppix[1] used a version of grub that would display a
text menu on old screens (I put it in qemu and all it gave me was text
to pick from!), but would on newer machines automatically use a full
graphical enhanced menu that had a progress bar for the countdown, a
very pretty menu layout, and the grub command for the kernel command
line at the bottom ready to edit on the spot.

Those grub enhancements would be very nice to see in Hoary+1, and on
future LiveCDs.  Even technical users would rather pick from a menu of
prefab commands than type in a prefab command, after all.

Is there a way to do this with current grub, or does this require
patching and hacking?

Another thing is to get Grub to be able to chainload (cd)+1 (I think it
can already do fd0), if it can't already.  Some documentation on it if
it can would be nice.  The idea here is to allow the administrator to
disable floppy and CD boot and use grub:

password --md5 $5$a9eee88883383838eeeeee$$$$$444444ALLYOURBASE

title Ubuntu
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img

title Boot from CD
lock
chainloader (cd0)+1

title Boot from Floppy
# different password we share, because we think
# floppy boot isn't as dangerous
# (*cough*floppygrubtocd*cough*)
password --md5 $9444$33$999999
lock
chainloader (fd0)+1


Any 'lock' encountered demands that you enter the password to boot it.

Changes to update-grub would also be neat.  Multi-level menus for example:

Windows
Ubuntu Linux
Fedora Boot Menu -->
  Fedora Core 3
Gentoo Boot Menu -->
  Hardened Gentoo Linux 2005.1
Recovery -->
  ..
  Ubuntu Recovery
  Ubuntu (old) 2.6.7
  Ubuntu Recovery (old) 2.6.7
Testing  -->
  ..
  Memtest86+ Memory Test

The grub command to do it is 'configfile':

root (hd0,0)

title Recovery
configfile /boot/grub/recovery.lst

Scanning for partitions with {,/boot}/grub/grub.conf would help.

[1] http://ftp2.kgt.org/pub/gnoppix.org/iso/gnoppix_0.8.1.iso
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