after spending some days in the forums i realized that many people have problems with setting up grub.conf. i think making things clearer in the handbook can help. many people think, "root" means the root-filesystem. the handbook already says that, but i think many people overlook that. actually you can set "root" to whatever you like when you specify the partition with the "kernel" and "initrd"-lines, like it is done in the handbook. therefore there are a lot of people in the forum posting their grub.conf-files, with wrong "root"-lines. the answer always is: "that didn't help", because the "root"-line isn't important in their settings. another frequently made error is "kernel (hd0,0) /kernel-2.4.22", with a space between "(hd0,0)" and "/kernel-2.4.22". that kind of things happen... so i propose the following grub.conf-layout: title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.22 root (hd0,0) kernel /kernel-2.4.22 root=/dev/hda3 initrd /initrd-2.4.22 so we get rid of these multiples "(hd0,0)", which are confusing. that way it is easier to understand what "root" means and the people won't add unused stuff in their configurations and it will be easier to track down problems. if you like it i could send a patch, but i don't know how to produce patch on webpages. if you point me to a "howto send documentation-patch"-howto i will do it. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I believe the current "root" explanation is sufficient. Users misinterpret the command because they thing it is indeed the same as / (root). Having a longer description on "root" wouldn't really solve this. The use of (hd0,0) in the "kernel" line is in our case not necessary (redundant) but some systems might want to store the kernels on a different partition (not /boot) while the grub stage information (and other important files) are on /boot. I'd rather keep it in there as it is (1) not wrong, and (2) usable for those that want a different partition. Many examples in the grub info pages use such a scheme, so I believe it is interesting enough to keep it this way. Regarding patches: all documentation is generated from XML files. The files are located in [gentoo]/xml/htdocs/doc/en/handbook. In this case, the file is called hb-install-bootloader.xml. You can view it by surfing to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/hb-install-bootloader.xml?passthru=1 or by using the ViewCVS at http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi (currently down though).
