[nmglug] OK, I have questions on Grub2

[WA7BSZ]

For most of us making grub legacy work is not that easy.  We may want XP to be the default boot.  Maybe we learned by guessing that we can use the place in menu.lst where it says 

howmany=all

and can change it to

howmany=2

for example, then just have it save 2 kernel versions, and then, when it upgrades the kernel again, it will still have XP as the default boot.  Is that the same on Grub2?  I didn't try to use it, I just gave up on 9.10 for now and am waiting for it to be at least 3 months old until I try it again,.

So, what are the limitations of legacy grub?  What does Grub2 give us?  What do we need that Grub2 has that legacy doesn't?  Ability to boot from new different media, to place an entry for a USB drive to be included when the usb device is present, but gone when not plugged in?  Is that already available by putting a copy of Grub on the USB device?  Does that work or not work depending on the BIOS settings, if the BIOS boot order is for USB before CD and internal HDD?  

Do you know if they are going to stop providing legacy grub?  Is that it?  

I know that trying to have the partition table in the first 512 byte sector of a hard drive, well, in the last 66 bytes, has required many workarounds for large drives with many partitions, so I would expect Grub2 to handle this better.  But I don't know about it.  I guess we would like to find a good tutorial, and we would hope it is at least as easy to understand as legacy grub.  You know how people don't like change.  We were going along and at least knew something about how to work with grub, and now, a new version of Ubuntu and a new version of grub shows up, and now it is going to take time, maybe many hours, to get back to where we were, assuming there are no major bugs still in it that make it so that no matter how much time we spend it still won't work.  It is just a bootloader and if we haven't gotten the latest greatest hardware, and legacy grub works, of course we are going to think that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  At the moment it
 seems like it has been fixed and become broke.

If we know that with grub2 there are great things it can do, then we will be more willing to learn about it.