I’m about as much annoyed by geolocation as everyone else, but I think this controversial proposal for cooperative geolocation is a good thing.
Up untill now, geolocation is being imposed on you by using an IP-to-location map. With cooperative geolocation, you’re the one in control. You can disable it if it bothers you. Perhaps you can even pretend to be somewhere else (useful e.g. when traveling), assuming they didn’t add any idiotic authority-based authentication to it (which I didn’t check).
My friend Jo Shields added the missing piece by writing the first theme that fit the basic requirements (uses only legal & free fonts and images with no external dependencies), and now GRUB gets a new face!
This is just one of the ton of possibilities our new graphical menu framework was designed for. If you want to try it out, grub-pc 1.98~experimental.20100111.1-1 has just been uploaded to Debian/experimental. For non-Debian systems, Jo’s blog post provides a standalone tarball which can be used with GRUB Experimental branch in Bazaar.
Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, including Jo, Colin for developing the gfxmenu framework and Vladimir for his extensive work reviewing and polishing it.
Now for the obvious question (before anyone asks): when is this reaching mainstream? Well, there’s lots of code being added, and keep in mind GRUB is a bootloader and it must not compromise on its main feature (being able to boot!), so we need a pack of brave souls to try out the code, find bugs and report them. Once we’re reasonably sure the new code is mature, it’ll find its way to GRUB trunk and eventually GRUB 1.98. So you can help us out! Install it; spread the news; make your desktop a bit nicer and come to us if you find that something went terribly wrong ;-)
I was very glad today to discover (yes, shame on me for not noticing earlier) that the Gnote project has come back to activity. A new maintainer, Debarshi Ray, has just released 0.7.0.
I’m very pleased to see that Gnote continues being maintained. It’s even more important now, as Fedora ships it in its default GNOME desktop, and so does gNewSense (the 100% free GNU/Linux distribution). It’s nice to see that the community doesn’t let down those who, for one reason or another, committed to Gnote and put their weight on it.
As for me, now that 0.6.2 has migrated to testing, I’ll get back to rolling out package updates. Expect 0.7.0 to land in Debian sid soon!
To be found in Vladimir’s “multiple terminal” branch, GRUB 2 displays in multiple terminals simultaneously, with a separate menu viewer for each one, resulting in menus with different metrics rendering the same content!
In this screenshot, GRUB running in QEMU with a serial terminal attached to it in a separate window:
Expect this to land in GRUB Experimental branch soon.
Better late than never. We promised internationalization and here comes GRUB with gettext support. Many thanks to Carles Pina for bringing GRUB a bit closer to end users.
Here’s GRUB menu in Catalan:
And here’s the Catalan version of GRUB command-line interface:
Help is much welcome from translators who want to add their own languages! Like many other GNU projects, translation support for GRUB is coordinated by the Translation Project. If you’re excited by the idea that your strings will be the very first localized message that is displayed on every user’s box, or simply want to bring our cause for computer freedom further, get in touch with your language team.
From preliminar/experimental port to almost-complete in 48 days. Nice work, Vladimir.
This is being a busy month for GRUB. Quick catch-up of GRUB news:
Dear lazyweb, this morning I got bitten by fake Delivery Status Notifications. You’ve probably seen this a thousand times:
Do you know of any blacklist containing all hosts and/or domains that do this?
Alternatively, I think a blacklist containing all qmail domains would probably cover most of it.
GNU GRUB 1.97 has just been released.
This release of GRUB is a significant breakthrough compared to GRUB 1.96. Among a long list of improvements, GRUB 1.97 includes support for booting the kernels of FreeBSD, OpenBSD
and NetBSD, it detects the Ext4 filesystem which is commonly used with the kernel Linux, and it implements a robust mechanism for booting from GPT drives, by embedding itself in the BIOS Boot partition.
I read that Vladimir Serbinenko’s effort to bring GRUB to the Lemote Yeeloong laptop has reached a milestone: It is now able to initialize and draw text in the display:
This is quite significant for GNU GRUB as it’s the first time it’s ported to a mipsel platform. In addition, it is planned to support the Yeeloong both as a “disk bootloader” (i.e. the way it is normally used on x86/PC) and as a “firmware bootloader”, thereby offering a more flexible alternative to PMON2000 (the preinstalled firmware).
The Lemote Yeeloong is a legacy-free, mipsel-based laptop that runs using entirely free software, including the firmware and its initialization routines.
