Grub2 grumbles

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

Context:

I'm installing Ubuntu 10.10 on my Acer Revo to use as a Home Theatre PC.  
Mostly as a MythTV client.

Sadly, I expect I might use the Win7 on it to get a performant Flash (the 
ION makes video fast but Flash on Linux doesn't exploit that whereas Flash 
on Win7 does).

For peculiar reasons that I've mentioned previously, I'm intending to use 
XBMC as a Myth client for now.

The XBMC ppa's don't support Ubuntu 10.10 -- still 10.04.  I found
that building XBMC for 10.10 wasn't trivial.

So: I installed Ubuntu 10.04 for now

Summary: I need to triple boot:
  Ubuntu 10.10
  Ubuntu 10.04
  Windows 7

I use 10.10's Grub2 as the bootloader that chooses amongst these
things.

Complaints:

grub-set-default with a label doesn't seem to work.  Perhaps it will
work with a number, but talk about fragile!  (I just tested: a
number doesn't work either)

With Grub1, I used to be able to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to customize
the menu.  Now the equivalent (/boot/grub/grub.cfg) is automatically
generated and not to be touched.  There is no clean and simple way for
me to take control (I don't count writing those arcane scripts as a
solution)

Consequences:

- I need to run grub on 10.10 whenever I update a kernel on 10.04.
  That's because the grub configuration thinks it knows how to load
  10.04's kernel rather than just chainloading

- I expect this will break down when the 10.10 and 10.04 kernels
  diverge in parameters.  After all, the 10.10 grub configuration
  is supplying the parameters to the 10.04 kernel

- the labels update-grub generates for the menu entries are not good.
  I could do much better if it would let me.

  It goofs up on the Windows partitions.  It calls the "recovery
  partition" (the one that can wipe your system back to the state
  it was delivered in):
  	Windows Vista (loader) (on /dev/sda1)
  and the real Win7 partition:
	Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)
  Those are quite ugly and increase the chance someone will blow away
  the system.  I'd like to be able to suppress the recovery partition
  menu item.

  It doesn't bother to mention the version of the release in the
  label.  So 10.10 and 10.04 kernels look alike (but it does mention
  the partition, so those who remember what is in /dev/sda6 will
  be OK).

These seem so stupid that perhaps I'm missing something.
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