Hi,
I'm proud to announce the release of GNU GRUB version 1.97.
GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable bootloader that supports a number of platforms, including standard BIOS-based PCs, IEEE-1275 platforms (such as the OLPC and some PowerPC/Sparc64 hardware) and coreboot, the free (as in freedom) pre-boot initialization framework.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
This release of GRUB is a significant breakthrough compared to GRUB 1.96. Among a long list of improvements (excerpt from NEWS file is attached), 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.
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.
This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.61 Ruby 1.8.7
GCC 4.4 is the recommended version for building it, although any version starting with 4.1.3 is supported in this release.
I hope you enjoy using GRUB as much as we enjoyed developing it.