can fedora has the animation grub like suse?

[Ken YANG]

as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.

can fedora has this kind of grub?

i search mailing archives, i found:

http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=115682990921967&w=2

but it seems that not have conclusion

[Matej Cepl]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.

Matej

[Deependra Shekhawat]

At least a good looking grub is much anticipated.

Post by Matej Cepl

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.
Matej
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[n0dalus]

Post by Matej Cepl
Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.

Is it possible to detect Xen (or just see if the system can do real
mode) before doing the animation? Could Xen be fixed to work with it?

n0dalus.

[Deependra Shekhawat]

At least a good looking grub is much anticipated.

Post by Matej Cepl

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.
Matej
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[n0dalus]

Post by Matej Cepl
Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.

Is it possible to detect Xen (or just see if the system can do real
mode) before doing the animation? Could Xen be fixed to work with it?

n0dalus.

[Manuel Arostegui Ramirez]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?
http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=115682990921967&w=2
but it seems that not have conclusion

IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before the
GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

[n0dalus]

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before the
GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

IMHO, that's fairly irrelevant. If people wait for all the "more
important" things to be done first, nothing will ever get done. If
someone wants to push to have this worked on, that's great -- don't
discourage them from doing that.

n0dalus.

[Manuel Arostegui Ramirez]

Post by n0dalus

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before
the GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

IMHO, that's fairly irrelevant. If people wait for all the "more
important" things to be done first, nothing will ever get done. If
someone wants to push to have this worked on, that's great -- don't
discourage them from doing that.
n0dalus.

Of course I didn't pretend to mean that, I just wanted to mean that GRUB
appearance, IMHO, should not have a quite high priority inside of the
proyect.
Obviusly, if someone wants to improve it and make it to be nicer, that's
welcome!
Again, I mean that no one might stop their currently work into the fedora
developemnt to jump into a GRUB appearance development. If they actually have
time to work in both issues that would be perfect, though. Thus, if you wanna
improve the GRUB style, just do it, it'd be welcome for sure.

Cheers.

[n0dalus]

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
Of course I didn't pretend to mean that, I just wanted to mean that GRUB
appearance, IMHO, should not have a quite high priority inside of the
proyect.
Obviusly, if someone wants to improve it and make it to be nicer, that's
welcome!
Again, I mean that no one might stop their currently work into the fedora
developemnt to jump into a GRUB appearance development. If they actually have
time to work in both issues that would be perfect, though. Thus, if you wanna
improve the GRUB style, just do it, it'd be welcome for sure.

Right. Sorry if I misunderstood you.

n0dalus.

[n0dalus]

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
Of course I didn't pretend to mean that, I just wanted to mean that GRUB
appearance, IMHO, should not have a quite high priority inside of the
proyect.
Obviusly, if someone wants to improve it and make it to be nicer, that's
welcome!
Again, I mean that no one might stop their currently work into the fedora
developemnt to jump into a GRUB appearance development. If they actually have
time to work in both issues that would be perfect, though. Thus, if you wanna
improve the GRUB style, just do it, it'd be welcome for sure.

Right. Sorry if I misunderstood you.

n0dalus.

[Manuel Arostegui Ramirez]

Post by n0dalus

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before
the GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

IMHO, that's fairly irrelevant. If people wait for all the "more
important" things to be done first, nothing will ever get done. If
someone wants to push to have this worked on, that's great -- don't
discourage them from doing that.
n0dalus.

Of course I didn't pretend to mean that, I just wanted to mean that GRUB
appearance, IMHO, should not have a quite high priority inside of the
proyect.
Obviusly, if someone wants to improve it and make it to be nicer, that's
welcome!
Again, I mean that no one might stop their currently work into the fedora
developemnt to jump into a GRUB appearance development. If they actually have
time to work in both issues that would be perfect, though. Thus, if you wanna
improve the GRUB style, just do it, it'd be welcome for sure.

Cheers.

[n0dalus]

Post by Manuel Arostegui Ramirez
IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before the
GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

IMHO, that's fairly irrelevant. If people wait for all the "more
important" things to be done first, nothing will ever get done. If
someone wants to push to have this worked on, that's great -- don't
discourage them from doing that.

n0dalus.

[Matthias Clasen]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Matthias Clasen

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Timeout = 0 is a very very bad idea. That would make hitting grub (and
booting anything but the default) very difficult. Screens do not
clear/change mode instanteanously. I've never seen the first few
seconds of the current timeout displayed on any system.

Give some time for people to react. There's nothing more annoying for
a user that a key which needs to be pressed durring a minuscule time
window for stuff to happen.

[Tomas Mraz]

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Matthias Clasen
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Timeout = 0 is a very very bad idea. That would make hitting grub (and
booting anything but the default) very difficult. Screens do not
clear/change mode instanteanously. I've never seen the first few
seconds of the current timeout displayed on any system.

+22

[Gilboa Davara]

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Matthias Clasen

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Timeout = 0 is a very very bad idea. That would make hitting grub (and
booting anything but the default) very difficult. Screens do not
clear/change mode instanteanously. I've never seen the first few
seconds of the current timeout displayed on any system.
Give some time for people to react. There's nothing more annoying for
a user that a key which needs to be pressed durring a minuscule time
window for stuff to happen.
--
Nicolas Mailhot

/+1

big-screen LCDs and older CRTs tend to have a noticeable input lag (or
in the cast of CRT, slow mode switch) making virtually impossible to
control grub if timeout <= 3-4 seconds.
We should not forget that a lot of Fedora users dual boot between Linux
and Windows - which makes them the first to get hit if grub goes
zero-wait.

- Gilboa

[Tomas Mraz]

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Matthias Clasen
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Timeout = 0 is a very very bad idea. That would make hitting grub (and
booting anything but the default) very difficult. Screens do not
clear/change mode instanteanously. I've never seen the first few
seconds of the current timeout displayed on any system.

+22

[Alan Cox]

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)

timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

Alan

[Matthias Clasen]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)
timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

I'm not attached to the "timeout 0" at all, and a "press any key..."
message from grub is certainly more useful than most of the other text
that appears on screen during boot... The thing we care about is
avoiding unnecessary mode switches and ugly transitions in the boot
sequence; for which it might be enough to not have grub show an image.

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 09:30:21 -0400,

Post by Matthias Clasen
I'm not attached to the "timeout 0" at all, and a "press any key..."
message from grub is certainly more useful than most of the other text
that appears on screen during boot... The thing we care about is
avoiding unnecessary mode switches and ugly transitions in the boot
sequence; for which it might be enough to not have grub show an image.

Getting rid of the splashimage is easy. I do that all of the time.
(In fact I turn off all of the graphical boot stuff.)

I wouldn't like a timeout of 0. I do test installs of Fedora and being able
to recover in grub is often faster than having to boot off a rescue CD/DVD.

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 09:30:21 -0400,

Post by Matthias Clasen
I'm not attached to the "timeout 0" at all, and a "press any key..."
message from grub is certainly more useful than most of the other text
that appears on screen during boot... The thing we care about is
avoiding unnecessary mode switches and ugly transitions in the boot
sequence; for which it might be enough to not have grub show an image.

Getting rid of the splashimage is easy. I do that all of the time.
(In fact I turn off all of the graphical boot stuff.)

I wouldn't like a timeout of 0. I do test installs of Fedora and being able
to recover in grub is often faster than having to boot off a rescue CD/DVD.

[Dave Jones]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)
timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

If we absolutely must proceed on this path, we want something simple like..
"hold down shift whilst booting" which grub will see and disable 'quiet' mode.
(Though grub won't actually see the key-down event, so that may not be
such a great idea either.)

Dave

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

This one could be easily solved by adding a Test sub-menu in grub,
containing stuff like boot entries without quiet, memtest86, etc
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 13:43:08 -0400,

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I wonder why that was ever there in the first place? I doubt that sending
output to the console has a significant effect on the boot time. If people
don't know what the messages mean, they are just going to ignore them
anyway.

[Alan Cox]

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient either.
If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in grub
and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.

Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

Alan

[Jesse Keating]

Post by Alan Cox
I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient
either. If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in
grub and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.
Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful history
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[Bill Nottingham]

Post by Jesse Keating
I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful history
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

... and yet, we use 3?

Bill

[Chris Brown]

Post by Jesse Keating

Post by Jesse Keating
I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful

history

Post by Jesse Keating
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

... and yet, we use 3?

Of which 2 seem to be taken up with the screen being painted...

A 10 second time-out seems sensible.

Chris

[Chris Brown]

Post by Jesse Keating

Post by Jesse Keating
I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful

history

Post by Jesse Keating
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

... and yet, we use 3?

Of which 2 seem to be taken up with the screen being painted...

A 10 second time-out seems sensible.

Chris

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

JK> I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of
JK> painful history has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

(We already do this in reverse when laptops hibernate; the grub
timeout is awfully short then. In fact, it kind of makes me wonder
why grub bothers to display the splash image in this case since it's
only there long enough to make it look like the hardware is crapping
out.)

- J<

[Jesse Keating]

Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. ?Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. ?It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

If we no longer do a modeswitch at the point where we start the countdown, a
timeout of 3 may be good. On many machines it just takes too long for the
modeswitch to finish or for screenreaders to kick in.

(We already do this in reverse when laptops hibernate; the grub
timeout is awfully short then. ?In fact, it kind of makes me wonder
why grub bothers to display the splash image in this case since it's
only there long enough to make it look like the hardware is crapping
out.)

We do it in hibernate to protect you from data corruption. If we allowed you
to boot something else the risk of modifying a file system you had mounted in
your Linux session that wasn't quite umounted cleanly can lead to nasty data
corruption which is a bad bad thing. Again here, if we stop doing the
countdown in a graphical mode it will get even shorter.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 20:09:49 -0500,

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
JK> I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of
JK> painful history has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.
Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt that next
process. Also if you are sitting at the console, can just hit the enter key.

There probably should be a simple way to change it post install for people
that want the shorter boot times but don't know to edit grub.conf.

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.

So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.

It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

- J<

[Chuck Anderson]

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.
So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.
It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Chuck Anderson
+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

Doesn't help users that need the bootloader to dual boot (vast number
of users). Or do you suggest they should bork their Fedora install so
the system accepts to let them reach the bootloader menu?

[Olivier Galibert]

Post by Chuck Anderson
+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

Windows does that iff the boot went far enough. If the windows
equivalent of the kernel can't be found or crashes you get a blue[1]
error screen and you're SOL.

Grub won over lilo, ever wondered *why* ?

OG.

[1] Different shade of blue iirc.

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Chuck Anderson
+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

Doesn't help users that need the bootloader to dual boot (vast number
of users). Or do you suggest they should bork their Fedora install so
the system accepts to let them reach the bootloader menu?

[Olivier Galibert]

Post by Chuck Anderson
+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

Windows does that iff the boot went far enough. If the windows
equivalent of the kernel can't be found or crashes you get a blue[1]
error screen and you're SOL.

Grub won over lilo, ever wondered *why* ?

OG.

[1] Different shade of blue iirc.

[Olivier Galibert]

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.
So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.

Which makes a crash in the kernel, an incorrect root= or an initrd
problem which makes disks impossible to mount unfixable, while
choosing a different kernel and/or changing root= could be enough to
go to the fixing stage.

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

Where and how?

OG.

[Chuck Anderson]

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.
So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.
It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

+1 Set it up expecting the boot to fail, and when it completes
successfully, set it back down. Windows notices when a previous boot
failed and offers you a menu without any keypresses...

[Olivier Galibert]

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.
So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.

Which makes a crash in the kernel, an incorrect root= or an initrd
problem which makes disks impossible to mount unfixable, while
choosing a different kernel and/or changing root= could be enough to
go to the fixing stage.

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

Where and how?

OG.

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

BW> Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt
BW> that next process.

So the first thing it should do is up the timeout and then set it back
after the boot process is done.

It's not as if issues like this haven't been solved elsewhere.

- J<

[Jesse Keating]

Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. ?Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. ?It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

If we no longer do a modeswitch at the point where we start the countdown, a
timeout of 3 may be good. On many machines it just takes too long for the
modeswitch to finish or for screenreaders to kick in.

(We already do this in reverse when laptops hibernate; the grub
timeout is awfully short then. ?In fact, it kind of makes me wonder
why grub bothers to display the splash image in this case since it's
only there long enough to make it look like the hardware is crapping
out.)

We do it in hibernate to protect you from data corruption. If we allowed you
to boot something else the risk of modifying a file system you had mounted in
your Linux session that wasn't quite umounted cleanly can lead to nasty data
corruption which is a bad bad thing. Again here, if we stop doing the
countdown in a graphical mode it will get even shorter.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 20:09:49 -0500,

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
JK> I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of
JK> painful history has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.
Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

Because if the OS is borked, you might not be able to interrupt that next
process. Also if you are sitting at the console, can just hit the enter key.

There probably should be a simple way to change it post install for people
that want the shorter boot times but don't know to edit grub.conf.

[Bill Nottingham]

Post by Jesse Keating
I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful history
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

... and yet, we use 3?

Bill

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

JK> I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of
JK> painful history has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.

Which would be another ten seconds uselessly wasted. Why can't we set
the timeout be as short as possible while still allowing it to be
interrupted in the case of something truly terribly bad, and let the
code that runs after grub is done accept input and perhaps reboot to
grub with a longer timeout if necessary. It certainly has plenty of
time while the rest of the boot process runs.

(We already do this in reverse when laptops hibernate; the grub
timeout is awfully short then. In fact, it kind of makes me wonder
why grub bothers to display the splash image in this case since it's
only there long enough to make it look like the hardware is crapping
out.)

- J<

[David Zeuthen]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient either.
If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in grub
and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.
Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

Maybe it's controversial, but I've been advocating that for most
scenarios it doesn't make sense to have an accessible boot loader;
that's why the Fedora 7 Desktop Live CD boot into gdm; from here the
user can enable AT's (e.g. ctrl+S for one sec to start the screen
reader), select language and so on. For Fedora 8, we're talking about
having keyboard selection there as well.

So from an a11y point of view, ideally there should be no need
whatsoever to even show the boot loader. I can't think why you would
ever want to show it for other reasons except a lot of current
enthusiasts who like to boot from different kernels (and if the OS fails
to boot, the boot loader can be smart about things; e.g. if the OS
didn't leave a cookie in /boot it can display the menu etc. etc. The
boot loader can also check whether you're holding down the 'b' key or
whatever).

Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

David

[Jesse Keating]

Post by David Zeuthen
So from an a11y point of view, ideally there should be no need
whatsoever to even show the boot loader. I can't think why you would
ever want to show it for other reasons except a lot of current
enthusiasts who like to boot from different kernels (and if the OS fails
to boot, the boot loader can be smart about things; e.g. if the OS
didn't leave a cookie in /boot it can display the menu etc. etc. The
boot loader can also check whether you're holding down the 'b' key or
whatever).
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Heh, I don't think it's controversial at all. I think it's good to be forward
looking. If we remove the necessities of having a boot menu, then having an
accessable boot menu sort of falls away there too. However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

I'm all for (somebody) gathering information about the usage cases of the boot
menu, and particularly accessability with it. Then looking to see if we can
obviate these uses with something inside the os or just smarter bootloader
configurations.

Just saying "we're going to kill the bootloader timeout" will get reactions
like "you can't do that, a11y will suffer!". But a more thought out approach
(which is what I'm sure is meant here) makes a lot of sense.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[David Zeuthen]

Post by Jesse Keating
However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

system-config-bootloader! (See my other reply to Jeremy)

David

[Jeff Spaleta]

Post by Jesse Keating
Heh, I don't think it's controversial at all. I think it's good to be forward
looking. If we remove the necessities of having a boot menu, then having an
accessable boot menu sort of falls away there too. However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

There are only two reasons to hit the boot menu that I've seen on any
machine where I'm frontline support for. I don't use a11y support so I
can't comment on any aspect of that.

1) Dual booting with windows. This one has th have an easily
discoverable or easily learned solution i think, since this impacts
non-geek users who aren't necessary doing their own technical support.
Holding down a special key-combo to get to an operating system
selection would work fine i think... if it works... and we can
convince keyboard manufacturers to start pre-labelling their keyboards
with hinting like a little penguin on the default key to hold
down...or stickers to send out with each boxset of fedora.

2) Hardware troubleshooting by twiddling boot time kernel parameters
on the fly via grub's editting features, or falling back to an older
kernel. If I had to do something to grub.conf while booted into the
linux system to turn that boot menu back on for troubleshooting I
wouldn't be a bent out of shape. Though of course it would impact my
workflow, and that's always a bad thing.

-jef"yippie stickers!!!!!"spaleta

[David Zeuthen]

Post by Jesse Keating
However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

system-config-bootloader! (See my other reply to Jeremy)

David

[Jeff Spaleta]

Post by Jesse Keating
Heh, I don't think it's controversial at all. I think it's good to be forward
looking. If we remove the necessities of having a boot menu, then having an
accessable boot menu sort of falls away there too. However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

There are only two reasons to hit the boot menu that I've seen on any
machine where I'm frontline support for. I don't use a11y support so I
can't comment on any aspect of that.

1) Dual booting with windows. This one has th have an easily
discoverable or easily learned solution i think, since this impacts
non-geek users who aren't necessary doing their own technical support.
Holding down a special key-combo to get to an operating system
selection would work fine i think... if it works... and we can
convince keyboard manufacturers to start pre-labelling their keyboards
with hinting like a little penguin on the default key to hold
down...or stickers to send out with each boxset of fedora.

2) Hardware troubleshooting by twiddling boot time kernel parameters
on the fly via grub's editting features, or falling back to an older
kernel. If I had to do something to grub.conf while booted into the
linux system to turn that boot menu back on for troubleshooting I
wouldn't be a bent out of shape. Though of course it would impact my
workflow, and that's always a bad thing.

-jef"yippie stickers!!!!!"spaleta

[David Andersson]

Post by David Zeuthen
Maybe it's controversial, but I've been advocating that for most
scenarios it doesn't make sense to have an accessible boot loader;

+1 You are not alone in your madness ;)
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[Jeremy Katz]

Post by David Zeuthen
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Well, since we haven't been showing the menu[1] on installs[2] by
default since 28 June 2004, I think I've already been through that
flamefest ;-)

Jeremy

[1] We let you enter the menu by pressing a key, but I don't see that
being controversial either; it's exactly what every other OS in the
world lets you do. We're maybe a little bit more verbose about what
we're doing, but that's not necessarily bad. Rewording some text is
definitely doable for The Future (tm)
[2] LiveCDs using isolinux means that that feature of grub isn't
available; there's a patch floating around that I found a week or two
ago to get hiddenmenu with syslinux menus too. I want to look at adding
that for F8 so the live experience is similar here.

[David Zeuthen]

Post by Jeremy Katz

Post by David Zeuthen
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Well, since we haven't been showing the menu[1] on installs[2] by
default since 28 June 2004, I think I've already been through that
flamefest ;-)

Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all.. meaning that you'd need to know the secret handshake to
actually dual-boot (e.g. holding down the 'b' key or something).

It's worth noting you need to do the same for dual-boot Mac OS X /
Windows Intel Mac laptops... e.g. hold down the Option key to get to the
boot menu. I think it's probably fine that way. [1]

David

[1] : And people needing AT's can boot into the OS and a) read docs
about the magic keys to press; b) configure the bootloader (in Mac OS X
it's the "Startup Disk" preference pane) from there using AT's of their
choice. For example, it would make sense for people to be able to say
"continue to boot into Linux by default, but next time boot into
Windows" - that solves the problem where you don't have a bootloader
configuration utility on the other OS. Anyway, just brain-storming.

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by David Zeuthen
It's worth noting you need to do the same for dual-boot Mac OS X /
Windows Intel Mac laptops... e.g. hold down the Option key to get to the
boot menu. I think it's probably fine that way. [1]

Emulating Apple/Microsoft vendor locking is not really something to
emulate.
We used to be proud people booted our system because they chose to, not
because we wedged/hid other options.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Christopher Aillon]

Post by David Zeuthen
Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all.. meaning that you'd need to know the secret handshake to
actually dual-boot (e.g. holding down the 'b' key or something).

Two random (and probably crack) ideas:

Would it make sense to add some magic in anaconda so that when someone
installs onto a drive with other OSes, we know we're in a dual-boot
setup and we re-enable a timeout? Do these people always want to select
in this manner?

Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Christopher Aillon
Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

So you'd have to boot Fedora in order to boot Windows. How sick is that?

Booting Fedora takes time.
If Fedora is dead you can't even load the other OS to burn a Fedora
rescue disk
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Christopher Aillon]

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Christopher Aillon
Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

So you'd have to boot Fedora in order to boot Windows. How sick is that?

Please. I never said that it should be the only way to boot into it.
We could still do the hold a button thing, but that's not too discoverable.

[Adam Jackson]

Post by Christopher Aillon

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Christopher Aillon
Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

So you'd have to boot Fedora in order to boot Windows. How sick is that?

Please. I never said that it should be the only way to boot into it.
We could still do the hold a button thing, but that's not too discoverable.

Which of the two major shipping OSes has a discoverable boot menu?

- ajax

[Christopher Aillon]

Post by Adam Jackson
Which of the two major shipping OSes has a discoverable boot menu?

Why would I care about their fallings? Linux users are more likely to
run a multiple boot setup than Win+Mac users combined. I've seen this
advertised as a selling point very often. "You can keep Windows around
for games _AND_ use Linux too for everything else" We shouldn't piss on
people that want to do this just because others do.

[David Zeuthen]

Post by Christopher Aillon

Post by Adam Jackson
Which of the two major shipping OSes has a discoverable boot menu?

Why would I care about their fallings? Linux users are more likely to
run a multiple boot setup than Win+Mac users combined. I've seen this
advertised as a selling point very often. "You can keep Windows around
for games _AND_ use Linux too for everything else" We shouldn't piss on
people that want to do this just because others do.

Well, gee, you know, maybe the boot loader can be modified to be smart
about things. After all, we have the source code to it. E.g. if there is
more than one OS, show the menu, otherwise don't. As such, a system
running only Fedora wouldn't show any menu unless you press the secret
'b' key or whatever. And sure, people can knock themselves out
configuring how it works.

David

[Nicolas Mailhot]

The only recurrent complaint about our bootloader is people who don't
care about it are forced to pay attention due to our current use of
flashy vga-16 background.

This can be solved by bios-like black & white plain text camouflage.

What additionnal purpose removing the grub text altogether or killing
the grub timeout window serves, appart from making various user
categories miserable? (We've already established some posters do not
care about them overmuch. That's not a valid technical argument)
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[David Zeuthen]

Post by Nicolas Mailhot
The only recurrent complaint about our bootloader is people who don't
care about it are forced to pay attention due to our current use of
flashy vga-16 background.
This can be solved by bios-like black & white plain text camouflage.
What additionnal purpose removing the grub text altogether or killing
the grub timeout window serves, appart from making various user
categories miserable? (We've already established some posters do not
care about them overmuch. That's not a valid technical argument)

We're discussing defaults here. One camp wants to get rid of eye-sore
known as the boot loader screen because many end users don't or can't
use it [1]. The other camp wants it to stay.

A while back I had hoped that having different "spins" of Fedora (or, if
you want, "canned configurations") would allow for the different camps
to work on different spins. Anyway, for the server spin you'd default to
showing the bootloader screen; for the desktop (or dare I say "Fedora
for Human Beings" spin? [2]) spin you wouldn't show it.

It didn't work out this way for Fedora 7 though. I wonder if it still
makes sense.

David


[1] : and to some people, it makes a ton more sense to configure boot
options via a dedicated UI (e.g. s-c-bootloader) in the desktop session
because that's accessible (in the a11y sense), translatable, support
complex scripts / glyphs and reachable via VNC. Or whatever. Of course,
one should still be able to configure things in the boot loader.

[2] : just kidding

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by David Zeuthen

Post by Nicolas Mailhot
The only recurrent complaint about our bootloader is people who don't
care about it are forced to pay attention due to our current use of
flashy vga-16 background.
This can be solved by bios-like black & white plain text camouflage.
What additionnal purpose removing the grub text altogether or killing
the grub timeout window serves, appart from making various user
categories miserable? (We've already established some posters do not
care about them overmuch. That's not a valid technical argument)

We're discussing defaults here. One camp wants to get rid of eye-sore
known as the boot loader screen

which you can do just by un-theming it

Post by David Zeuthen
because many end users don't or can't use it [1].

That's your personal interpretation
The same people don't or can't use BIOS output, and they don't reject
it.

Post by David Zeuthen
Anyway, for the server spin you'd default to
showing the bootloader screen;

server people have many tools & infrastructure and wouldn't care a lot
about a stupid default. They'd just kickstart the right one.

Post by David Zeuthen
for the desktop (or dare I say "Fedora
for Human Beings" spin? [2]) spin you wouldn't show it.

Desktop folks need it to access their windows game partition and legacy
un-backuped data

Post by David Zeuthen
[1] : and to some people, it makes a ton more sense to configure boot
options via a dedicated UI (e.g. s-c-bootloader) in the desktop session
because that's accessible (in the a11y sense), translatable, support
complex scripts / glyphs and reachable via VNC.

For most people having to configure anything in a dedicated UI is way
worse than a system that just takes care of itself like grub does
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Arjan van de Ven]

Post by David Zeuthen

Post by Nicolas Mailhot
The only recurrent complaint about our bootloader is people who don't
care about it are forced to pay attention due to our current use of
flashy vga-16 background.
This can be solved by bios-like black & white plain text camouflage.
What additionnal purpose removing the grub text altogether or killing
the grub timeout window serves, appart from making various user
categories miserable? (We've already established some posters do not
care about them overmuch. That's not a valid technical argument)

We're discussing defaults here. One camp wants to get rid of eye-sore
known as the boot loader screen because many end users don't or can't
use it [1]. The other camp wants it to stay.

having a one line
[ Press <key> within 3 seconds to enter boot configuration ]
is going to be required though.. (just please talk to your own support
department about how important such things are for keeping the costs of
support for a commercial distro down).
Even Windows has something like this..

and if you say "but nobody should use it"... you're right in theory. In
practice....

please design the OS to be user friendly even when things don't go quite
as they should.

[Alan Cox]

Post by Adam Jackson

Post by Christopher Aillon
Please. I never said that it should be the only way to boot into it.
We could still do the hold a button thing, but that's not too discoverable.

Which of the two major shipping OSes has a discoverable boot menu?

My washing machine doesn't need one. Oh wait you mean the fringe *PC* OS
market...

Which of the two major shipping PC OSes doesn't have a cynical self centred
reason for making interoperability hard and for making dual booting as tricky
as possible, or defaulting to removing the other OS on install.

The policy is nothing to do with end users its everything to do with MONEY

[Ralf Corsepius]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Adam Jackson

Post by Christopher Aillon
Please. I never said that it should be the only way to boot into it.
We could still do the hold a button thing, but that's not too discoverable.

Which of the two major shipping OSes has a discoverable boot menu?

My washing machine doesn't need one.

Neither does mine, but ...

Post by Alan Cox
Oh wait you mean the fringe *PC* OS
market...

... my washing machine ...
... doesn't hang due to kernel bugs.
... doesn't have multiple configs.
... doesn't receive kernel updates.
... 's manufacturer doesn't ask me to test configs.

Consequence: Unlike for my washing machine, I can't avoid multiple grub
configs on all of my Fedora machines.

Ralf

[Ralf Ertzinger]

Hi.

Post by Ralf Corsepius
... my washing machine ...
... doesn't hang due to kernel bugs.

Are you sure about that?

[Ralf Corsepius]

Post by Ralf Ertzinger
Hi.

Post by Ralf Corsepius
... my washing machine ...
... doesn't hang due to kernel bugs.

Are you sure about that?

... well, at least a "reset" has always brought it up again ;)

... something, I can't necessarily state about Fedora ;)

Ralf

[Tony Nelson]

Post by Christopher Aillon

Post by Nicolas Mailhot

Post by Christopher Aillon
Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

So you'd have to boot Fedora in order to boot Windows. How sick is that?

Please. I never said that it should be the only way to boot into it.
We could still do the hold a button thing, but that's not too discoverable.

Could there be a button or menu item in grub to set it right there, with a
default timeout of, say, 30 seconds? Then people who want a shorter
timeout (most everyone!) could just do it right then, before booting into
an OS.

[Florin Andrei]

Post by Christopher Aillon
Would it make sense to add some magic in anaconda so that when someone
installs onto a drive with other OSes, we know we're in a dual-boot
setup and we re-enable a timeout? Do these people always want to select
in this manner?

On a dual-boot system, the need for and the optimal duration of a
timeout are higher than on a dedicated, single-OS machine.

There's probably no unique solution to fit all real situations, so the
installer must take that into account.

Also, the "secret handshake" idea is bad. Just to mention "press X to do
Y" doesn't hurt anything and reduces user frustration tremendously.

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Christopher Aillon
Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

So you'd have to boot Fedora in order to boot Windows. How sick is that?

Booting Fedora takes time.
If Fedora is dead you can't even load the other OS to burn a Fedora
rescue disk
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Alan Cox]

Post by David Zeuthen
Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all.. meaning that you'd need to know the secret handshake to
actually dual-boot (e.g. holding down the 'b' key or something).

Which is precisely what the hardware vendors found was a problem because
people lost the manual or didn't know about it. They've spent twenty years
discovering it was a stupid idea can we therefore dismiss it in 20 minutes
instead ?

In addition for users with screenreader devices it would be helpful to know
when it hit a key remembering they don't have all the other visual clues
people rely upon.

All we need is "Hit [F10] for system menu"

it'll look like all the

"Hit [F8] for RAID setup"

"Press [F4] to set your printer port on fire"

type messages they arelady expect on boot

Alan

[Garrick Staples]

Post by Alan Cox
All we need is "Hit [F10] for system menu"

Just for the record, using a "normal" letter key is much easier for
those of us using serial consoles. thanks.
--
Garrick Staples, GNU/Linux HPCC SysAdmin
University of Southern California

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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[Gilboa Davara]

Post by Garrick Staples

Post by Alan Cox
All we need is "Hit [F10] for system menu"

Just for the record, using a "normal" letter key is much easier for
those of us using serial consoles. thanks.
--

/+1

ESC+n doesn't always work...

How about making it configurable?

- Gilboa

[Colin Walters]

Post by Alan Cox
All we need is "Hit [F10] for system menu"

Agreed with this; no need to bikeshed here.

[dragoran]

Post by David Zeuthen
Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all..

but what do we gain by removing it? save 5 seconds on boot by removing
features and breaking dualboot systems? it would be better to have
"press <insertbuttonhere> to skip the bootloader"

[Mail List]

Post by dragoran
features and breaking dualboot systems? it would be better to have
"press <insertbuttonhere> to skip the bootloader"

Minor observation - its not just dual boot - its booting back to previous
or test kernels - or booting to install firmware via grub etc.

Being able to easiy go back to a previous kernel if the new one becomes
unbootable is certainly important - that is obviously something that must be
doable (without booting dvd and editing the timeout) - is it? I assume so.

[Jeff Spaleta]

Post by Mail List
Being able to easiy go back to a previous kernel if the new one becomes
unbootable is certainly important - that is obviously something that must be
doable (without booting dvd and editing the timeout) - is it? I assume so.

I dont think anyone is suggesting taking away the ability to switch.
The question here is how to best present the ability so that it
doesn't get in the way of the designed for use case.

I think its perfectly reasonable to look into dropping the
presentation of the boot menu by default and replacing it with a
combination of hot key at boot , some discoverable default in-distro
config tool which lets you turn the menu back on, some documentation,
and some failover logic which knows to bring up the boot menu if a
boot failure was detected on last boot.

Hell... i say make the automated logic bring up the boot menu if a new
entry was added to the grub menu since last boot. So when you get a
new kernel, and you reboot you get a visual cue that something
significant has changed with regard to the boot. That might help in
discoverability for the average user. What we can't do, is just rely
on a hot key to replace the current presentation, because the hot key
is not discoverable all by itself.

-jef

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by David Zeuthen
It's worth noting you need to do the same for dual-boot Mac OS X /
Windows Intel Mac laptops... e.g. hold down the Option key to get to the
boot menu. I think it's probably fine that way. [1]

Emulating Apple/Microsoft vendor locking is not really something to
emulate.
We used to be proud people booted our system because they chose to, not
because we wedged/hid other options.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Christopher Aillon]

Post by David Zeuthen
Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all.. meaning that you'd need to know the secret handshake to
actually dual-boot (e.g. holding down the 'b' key or something).

Two random (and probably crack) ideas:

Would it make sense to add some magic in anaconda so that when someone
installs onto a drive with other OSes, we know we're in a dual-boot
setup and we re-enable a timeout? Do these people always want to select
in this manner?

Or would it make sense to add some sort of option for dual boot based on
knowledge we have into the reboot confirmation dialog that GNOME presents?

[David Zeuthen]

Post by Jeremy Katz

Post by David Zeuthen
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Well, since we haven't been showing the menu[1] on installs[2] by
default since 28 June 2004, I think I've already been through that
flamefest ;-)

Right; but there's still a timeout. I'd suggest we didn't show anything
at all.. meaning that you'd need to know the secret handshake to
actually dual-boot (e.g. holding down the 'b' key or something).

It's worth noting you need to do the same for dual-boot Mac OS X /
Windows Intel Mac laptops... e.g. hold down the Option key to get to the
boot menu. I think it's probably fine that way. [1]

David

[1] : And people needing AT's can boot into the OS and a) read docs
about the magic keys to press; b) configure the bootloader (in Mac OS X
it's the "Startup Disk" preference pane) from there using AT's of their
choice. For example, it would make sense for people to be able to say
"continue to boot into Linux by default, but next time boot into
Windows" - that solves the problem where you don't have a bootloader
configuration utility on the other OS. Anyway, just brain-storming.

[Jesse Keating]

Post by David Zeuthen
So from an a11y point of view, ideally there should be no need
whatsoever to even show the boot loader. I can't think why you would
ever want to show it for other reasons except a lot of current
enthusiasts who like to boot from different kernels (and if the OS fails
to boot, the boot loader can be smart about things; e.g. if the OS
didn't leave a cookie in /boot it can display the menu etc. etc. The
boot loader can also check whether you're holding down the 'b' key or
whatever).
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Heh, I don't think it's controversial at all. I think it's good to be forward
looking. If we remove the necessities of having a boot menu, then having an
accessable boot menu sort of falls away there too. However I don't think you
can get away with that on dual boot systems where you want to be able to
select what operating system you boot from.

I'm all for (somebody) gathering information about the usage cases of the boot
menu, and particularly accessability with it. Then looking to see if we can
obviate these uses with something inside the os or just smarter bootloader
configurations.

Just saying "we're going to kill the bootloader timeout" will get reactions
like "you can't do that, a11y will suffer!". But a more thought out approach
(which is what I'm sure is meant here) makes a lot of sense.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[David Andersson]

Post by David Zeuthen
Maybe it's controversial, but I've been advocating that for most
scenarios it doesn't make sense to have an accessible boot loader;

+1 You are not alone in your madness ;)
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[Jeremy Katz]

Post by David Zeuthen
Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

Well, since we haven't been showing the menu[1] on installs[2] by
default since 28 June 2004, I think I've already been through that
flamefest ;-)

Jeremy

[1] We let you enter the menu by pressing a key, but I don't see that
being controversial either; it's exactly what every other OS in the
world lets you do. We're maybe a little bit more verbose about what
we're doing, but that's not necessarily bad. Rewording some text is
definitely doable for The Future (tm)
[2] LiveCDs using isolinux means that that feature of grub isn't
available; there's a patch floating around that I found a week or two
ago to get hiddenmenu with syslinux menus too. I want to look at adding
that for F8 so the live experience is similar here.

[Jesse Keating]

Post by Alan Cox
I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient
either. If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in
grub and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.
Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

I talked with Jeremy about this today and he said that lots of painful history
has shown that 10 seconds is the optimal time out.
--
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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[David Zeuthen]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient either.
If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in grub
and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.
Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

Maybe it's controversial, but I've been advocating that for most
scenarios it doesn't make sense to have an accessible boot loader;
that's why the Fedora 7 Desktop Live CD boot into gdm; from here the
user can enable AT's (e.g. ctrl+S for one sec to start the screen
reader), select language and so on. For Fedora 8, we're talking about
having keyboard selection there as well.

So from an a11y point of view, ideally there should be no need
whatsoever to even show the boot loader. I can't think why you would
ever want to show it for other reasons except a lot of current
enthusiasts who like to boot from different kernels (and if the OS fails
to boot, the boot loader can be smart about things; e.g. if the OS
didn't leave a cookie in /boot it can display the menu etc. etc. The
boot loader can also check whether you're holding down the 'b' key or
whatever).

Guess ya'll can start flaming me now for saying the boot loader menu
shouldn't be shown be default cuz I know, gosh, it's controversial :-)

David

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

This one could be easily solved by adding a Test sub-menu in grub,
containing stuff like boot entries without quiet, memtest86, etc
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 13:43:08 -0400,

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I wonder why that was ever there in the first place? I doubt that sending
output to the console has a significant effect on the boot time. If people
don't know what the messages mean, they are just going to ignore them
anyway.

[Alan Cox]

Post by Dave Jones
Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

I've had private mail pointing out that 1-2 seconds is not sufficient either.
If you are a disabled user relying upon the text mode support in grub
and a screen reader that is not long enough for the message to be read
and a response.

Perhaps someone with accessibility tools in Red Hat can test the needed timeout

Alan

[Matthias Clasen]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)
timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

I'm not attached to the "timeout 0" at all, and a "press any key..."
message from grub is certainly more useful than most of the other text
that appears on screen during boot... The thing we care about is
avoiding unnecessary mode switches and ugly transitions in the boot
sequence; for which it might be enough to not have grub show an image.

[Dave Jones]

Post by Alan Cox

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)
timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

Right. It's painful enough already having to walk some users through
"remove 'quiet' from your boot command line" when diagnosing "my computer won't boot"
bugs. Some users have absolutely no idea what this means, and making it
even more hidden is going to raise that barrier further.

If we absolutely must proceed on this path, we want something simple like..
"hold down shift whilst booting" which grub will see and disable 'quiet' mode.
(Though grub won't actually see the key-down event, so that may not be
such a great idea either.)

Dave

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Post by Matthias Clasen

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Timeout = 0 is a very very bad idea. That would make hitting grub (and
booting anything but the default) very difficult. Screens do not
clear/change mode instanteanously. I've never seen the first few
seconds of the current timeout displayed on any system.

Give some time for people to react. There's nothing more annoying for
a user that a key which needs to be pressed durring a minuscule time
window for stuff to happen.

[Alan Cox]

Post by Matthias Clasen
We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

Putting timeout 0 in grub.conf doesn't work by the way. I've been caught by
this and you get situations where the BIOS or driver menus steal one keystroke
and grub finishes before the next autorepeat. Then you have to use a rescue
CD and hand edit grub.conf which isn't user friendly 8)

timeout of a second or so with no text probably works fine although its not
a good idea. Hardware vendors put back "hit F12 to ..." type messages for
a reason - people lose the manual and can't work out when to hit a key or
what to hit so generate support traffic and get annoyed...

Alan

[Ken YANG]

as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.

can fedora has this kind of grub?

i search mailing archives, i found:

http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=115682990921967&w=2

but it seems that not have conclusion

[Matej Cepl]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

Please no, it breaks Xen as that animation is in the real mode.

Matej

[Manuel Arostegui Ramirez]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?
http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=115682990921967&w=2
but it seems that not have conclusion

IMHO, there're loads of things which should need to be improved before the
GRUB appearance issue.
Just my opinion...

[Matthias Clasen]

Post by Ken YANG
as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
can fedora has this kind of grub?

We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup