easy grub restore option for ubiquity?

[Evan Dandrea]

I'm CC'ing in the ubuntu-installer mailing list so that the conversation can
continue there, where interested parties can contribute their thoughts on this.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:22 PM, allcoms<allcoms at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Evan!
>
> I understand you are the current maintainer of ubiquity, the ubuntu
> boot menu util? I recently submitted the following as a potential
> papercut - it got rejected but they recommended I forward my
> suggestion onto you so here it is. I'd like to hear what you think
> about the potential of this being added onto ubiquity?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dan
>
> -------------
>
> Once a new Linux user discovers he can dual, triple, quad or whatever
> boot so many hundreds of Linux distros, it is very normal for people to
> have not only Ubuntu and Windows but multiple other distros of Linux or
> *BSD or whatever. Some distro installers don't give any option of if you
> want to install grub to mbr or not and quite often they do a poor job,
> if any, of detecting other OSes that are installed and correctly adding
> these to grub or whatever bootloader it uses and often this will result
> in users thinking they have lost access to that OS forever simply
> because its not listed in their new installs menu.lst file!
>
> I'm sure many of you will recognise this situation. At this point I can
> bet there have been many booting off their Ubuntu install disc hoping
> for a 'Restore (GRUB) boot menu' option which is exactly what I'd like
> to see. This new boot option would present a list of partitions (or
> distros) detected and ask you which one you wanted to restore the GRUB
> menu.lst boot menu configuration off and hence easily get your old
> install back without any tricky splicing or editing of multiple menu.lst
> files.

This is indeed not a papercut.  Equally, this would not belong in ubiquity, as
it by design only handles installation of the contents of the live media to a
disk, and nothing more.  Rather, this would require:

 * modification to gfxboot-theme-ubuntu to add the CD boot menu option.
 * modification to casper to process the selected option during boot and to
   spawn the GRUB recovery tool.
 * a GRUB recovery application that acted as a simple frontend to grub-install.

My suggestion would be to draft a specification
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeatureSpecifications), then ask here if someone will
review it.  From there you can either work on it yourself, sending patches to
the above mentioned applications to this mailing list, or solicit help in
implementing it on either this mailing list or ubuntu-devel-discuss.

Do note however, that the developers already have a lot to work on for Karmic.