ok am back to square one finally. Almost a week of compiling different versions of grub2 (inc bzr latest) on various build systems (OS's) on a macbook 5,1
I still have monitor detection issues
symptoms manifest themselves as a reversal of colors as previously mentioned; ie red is displayed as blue, blue displayed as red, cyan displayed as yellow etc etc but otherwise perfect (not counting lack of mac wireless support of course).
The monitor detection is an issue only with x86_64 builds but not with i386 builds, neither is it an issue when checking screenshots which all displayed correct colors despite what appeared on the monitor.
All tests used (and am still using) the Frame buffer drivers, both in grub2 and tinycore. Am unable to make Xorg drivers work but have only attempted in confless mode which thats ok due to their size and I don't need a permanent 24/7 operation from this build so Xfbdev works great for my needs thanks.
Seems like there is a hurdle to jump around every corner and there are so many corners in building the grub2, though the biggest issue was rebuilding the language support in the bzr version which was resolved as in previous post. Next big issue for me was the confusion of building and installing for another drive (USB) on a system using a different version of grub. The remedy for most of my troubles was build on a machine using the same architecture ie same machine for the intended use, though building in an environment which already booted into full efi mode helped it seems, though clearly is not that critical. For my current build system I installed ubuntu 12.04 x86_64 for this which presented it's own set of problems. When all said and done these were mostly a path issue, so I'd like to try again using a tinycore build system soon.
sudo ./grub-install -v
grub-install (GRUB) 2.00
currently have built and am using the above grub version ( I thought it was the latest bzr..)
on a macbook 5,1 from a USB booting the modded vmlinuz64 kernel with core64 in EFI mode. A different directory structure than previous post (will update that asap).
configure and make commands as Juanito used more or less.. Install success only with my variation of the command issued from grub2 build directory
sudo ./grub-install --root-directory=/media/<MountedDriveLabel> --no-floppy --recheck --force
Undoubtedly the most important and useful command for my level of experience in this project was
./configure --help
Thanks again to Juanito for building the modded vmlinuz64 without which booting in efi mode would not have been possible.