thinking the grub 2 way

[Rance Hall]

Hello folks.

With the release of grub 2 which I was oblivious to till I started
work on a project that required I brush up on my grub skills I finally
have the tool I have been looking for.

I want to setup a (nearly) identical set of boot scripts that can run
from net, cd, or usb key to install and do repairs from.

The new netboot support borrowed from etherboot was just what I needed.

Thanks all for the hard work.

Now for the problem/question:

Apparently my dyslexia is getting in the way but I can't understand
the documentation for grub 2.

In a working debian/ubuntu install, there are scripts which read
settings files and generate a grub.cfg.

In my project I don't have that luxury as the scripts haven't been
written yet, and are not part of the project roadmap.

I need to create a grub.cfg from scratch with serial support.

I also need grub to "keep track" of the console selection so it can
dynamically create kernel append lines for various linux installers,
and repair tools.
Some of the tools do not work well over a serial connection due to the
tools lack of VT100 support.  It would be nice to dynamically generate
the boot choices based on the current console use.

I still make great use of serial consoles for debugging and headless
server management, but I'm getting very tired of trying to find a
monitor and keyboard/mouse everytime I need to do an os repair because
I can't get the serial console working.

I think I should be able to do this with the new grub features, but I
am getting lost in what I see as irrelevant documentation.

If it would help, I'll happily post a working grub legacy menu.lst
header which does handle serial stuff well, that I was originally
intending to use in my new project till I found and read about grub2.

Can someone help me get started please?  Thanks

Is what I want doable?

Thanks for all your help.

Rance