GRUB 2 now default for new installations

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 09:20 +0200, Markus Hitter wrote:
> Am 10.06.2009 um 21:44 schrieb Lars Wirzenius:
> 
> > ke, 2009-06-10 kello 15:21 -0400, John Moser kirjoitti:
> >> Every argument for putting Grub or the kernel on a separate partition
> >> has been based around the idea that these files are somehow more
> >> important than, say, /bin/sh
> >
> > Putting the kernel (i.e., /boot) on a separate partition is often
> > mandated by the BIOS not being able to read all of a large hard  
> > disk. I
> > have a motherboard from 2008 that has that problem, so it's not  
> > ancient
> > history, either.
> 
> Additionally, if you have more than one installation of Ubuntu on the  
> same platter, you really want to share /boot with both installations.
> 
> Not doing so means two /boot's, while you can address only one of  
> those in the master boot record. As /boot also contains kernels, you  
> end up booting grub from one partition and the kernel from the other  
> partition. Kernel install scripts can't deal with such a situation,  
> you end up sync'ing those two /boots manually after each update of  
> one of the kernels.
> 
Kind of.  I don't have separate /boot partitions for my Karmic, Jaunty,
& Squeeze installs - grub2 + os-prober makes this work pretty well, but
it does require running update-grub2 in the Karmic install to update the
master grub.cfg.

It's a bit of a trade-off, really.  Not sharing /boot means a manual
step for non-Karmic kernel ABI updates, sharing /boot in my experience
results in contention for menu.lst.