[Bug 615769] Re: fonts should be installed to /boot/grub

[KEYofR]

Ubuntu 12.04 with grub 1.99-21ubuntu3.1

Same problem here but not because of btrfs or any other filesystem
support.

In my case it's because / lives on a built-in sdcard reader in a Sony Vaio P netbook.
The card reader is not bootable, has no bios support, and at boot time grub has no driver that can see it.

/boot does live on a bootable drive, a usb stick, and internal hd is all Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
So /boot is on a small removable usb drive and / is entirely on a 32G sdcard.

update-grub generates a grub.conf that refers to
(sdcard,partition)/usr/share/... for background image and for font.

At boot time, sdcard is not is not accessible and so the loadfont line fails, and so gfxterm does not load.
Booting still works. It fails gracefully and falls back to a non-gfxterm plain text mode that functions.

The wallpaper image can be taken care of by copying it to somewhere
under /boot and editing /etc/default/grub to reflect that.

But the font is still a problem.

If I manually copy unicode.pf2  to /boot/grub, and manually change
/boot/grub/grub.cfg to refer to the external usb drive that /boot lives
on instead of the internal card reader that / lives on, then at boot
time gfxmenu and the background image and the font all load as normal.

It appears that the tests is /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib fail to
guess that / will not be accessible at boot time.

So if that can't be made smarter, then at least we need a
/etc/default/grub option to TELL it. It looks like the rest of the code
would do the right thing and automatically copy any wallpapers and fonts
to /boot/... and write grub.cfg to refer to those copies instead of the
originals if there was just a way to override the automatic detection
and tell it that / will not be available.

Right now my manual changes get lost every time update-grub runs.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/615769

Title:
  fonts should be installed to /boot/grub

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: grub2

  fonts for GRUB 2 are installed to /usr/share/

  if / is not readable for grub (i.e. because / is a btrfs filesystem),
  GRUB can only use fonts in a separate /boot partition

  I stumbled over this when I tried to set a GRUB background image on a
  btrfs system. It didn't work because GRUB started in text mode. And it
  took me a while to find out why (because it could not find a font
  file).

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