GRUB 1.97 released



GNU GRUB is upgraded to version 1.97. GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable bootloader that supports a number of platforms & is included in many Linux distributions.



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.


Release notes:
  • Add support for loading XNU (MacOS X kernel).
  • ACPI override support.
  • Integrated gptsync.
  • Password protection support.
  • Partition manipulation tool.
  • Add `keystatus' command.
  • Unicode fonts are now used by default.
  • Add `hdparm' command.
  • Add support for getting the current date and time from CMOS as variables.
  • Add `drivemap' command.
  • Add support for RAID levels 4,6 and 10.
  • update-grub is replaced by grub-mkconfig.
  • When booting from PXE, PXE can be used to load files.
  • High resolution timer support.
  • Image loaders now support IO buffering.
  • Add `crc' command.
  • Add Cygwin support.
  • Add x86_64 EFI support.
  • Use LZMA compression instead of LZO.
  • Support for saving the environment from and loading the environment from a file.
  • Allow the UUID to be used as device name.
  • The `search' command can use UUIDs now.
  • Add support for IEEE 1275 on i386.
  • Create partmap.lst and use it to automatically load partition map modules.
  • grub-mkconfig supports os-prober to add operating systems to the boot menu.
  • The ATA driver supports devices bigger than 2 TiB.
  • Add support for the UDF, AFS and EXT4 filesystems.
  • The ISO9660 filesystem supports the Joliet extension
  • Add support for loading kernels of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
  • Add new command `sleep'.
  • Support for direct access to AT keyboards.
  • New utility `grub-fstest'.
A source tarball for the new release can be found at:

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.tar.gz

and its GPG detached signature [*]:

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use either of the above signature files to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First,
be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball.
Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify grub-1.97.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys DEA2C38E

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

source: trunsonlinux.com

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