As a first public prerelease, version 1.90 of GRUB2 was released a few days ago. GRUB2 is a rewrite of GRUB Legacy (the version commonly in use today) with portability and extensibility in mind. It already works on PC and PowerPC, and a Sparc64 port is being worked on. This release does not yet support everything that GRUB Legacy supports, but is estimated to do so in the near future. Version 1.90 is the first GRUB2 prerelease and not yet considered stable, so it should not be used on production systems.

New features compared to GRUB Legacy:

• A compact core image, there is no need for stage 1.5 anymore, this is replaced by rescue mode.
• Dynamic module loading including loading commands such as ls and more.
• Real memory management.
• Object-oriented framework.
• PC support.
• PowerPC support (Pegagos II, BriQ and the new world apples (G3 and G4) are supported).
• It is easy to port.
• Accessing filesystems in filesystems ("loopback")
• Support for a VGA framebuffer.
• More types op partition maps are supported (Amiga RDB, Sun and Apple).
• An argument parser that makes using GNU style arguments and help possible.

From Yoshinori K. Okuji
Subject: GRUB 1.90 is released
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 19:39:45 +0200

I'm happy to announce the release of GRUB 1.90. This is the first of
our prereleases leading up to GRUB 2.0. We encourage you to try it, as
we have done a significant amount of work towards GRUB 2. Note that this
release is mainly for developers who are willing to contribute to our
project. If you need a working solution immediately, you'd better to stick to
GRUB Legacy at the moment.

The source distribution is available from .

Send any questions, ideas, bug reports to .

Here is the relevant NEWS:

New in 1.90:

* Rename the project name PUPA to GRUB. Now this version is the
  developmental version of GRUB officially.

* The GRUB emulator ``grub-emu'' is added.

* Add support for newworld Mac. This should work with other
  PowerPC-based machines as well, if they use IEEE 1275
  (Open Firmware).

* Too many changes to describe. Look at ChangeLog for more details.

Thanks,
Okuji