Using GRUB Stage1 as a "Get up in the morning" loa

[dh]

I'm truly annoyed with writing a Stage1 loader, and thought: what if i "rip-off" grub's (eg. compile it to load a custom stage2, releasing source and such as per GPL). The reason for all this lies in my time-budget, and current ability with Assembly. I have little time to work on OSdev, so I need to have all the REALLY tough stuff done quick if I ever want to make progress. eg. Stage1. Stage2 imho isn't as hard because it's basically a simple one-task kernel (or maybe multi-tasked, pending on the design ). So the question is: is this legal, a good idea, desirable? If not :'( I'll be spending alot more time figuring out other Stage1s .

Cheers, DH.

PS. My stage2 will be open sourced, but under another license.

[Dex4u]

Have you seen this : http://alexfru.chat.ru/epm.html#los4d
OS Loader, instead of Grubs ?.

[dh]

ya, but i havn't delved into it much. Thanks for reminding me I had it , i may just use it; though it appears a tad heavy in the Assembly department . Wrong directory: bootprog . Looks good!

Thanks again, DH.

[Dex4u]

It would also be possable to use Dex4u as a boot loader, as it got driver for floppy, atapi, hdd, usb and now it can load modules, also it got built in functions for vesa for eye-candy, it can also call bios functions from pmode.
And it less than 50k.

[dh]

I'll take THAT into serious consideration when you implement batch operations and such. Another thing is password-protection, but that can be hacked in later if ABSOLUTLY necessary. Until the time comes, I'll be keeping an eye on DEX4U for that vital autoexec.bat .

Cheers, DH.