Bug 119645

Summary:	Hiding boot options in graphical grub menu is suboptimal
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Matthias Hopf <mhopf>
Component:	Usability	Assignee:	Siegfried Olschner <siegfried.olschner>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Siegfried Olschner <siegfried.olschner>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	Alpha 4
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Matthias Hopf 2005-09-30 13:17:27 UTC

In 10.0 the boot options are hidden for the first time. It is really annoying
that one has to press 'F2' before being able to enter any boot options,
especially on laptops.

Suggestions: either enable boot options again, or only display them on the first
typed character. It should be possible to boot runlevel 3 by just entering '3'
'return' as before.

Comment 1 Siegfried Olschner 2005-10-11 08:12:32 UTC

I need some information please: 
 
1) Do you use your Laptop as a "normal" white collar worker?  
   What boot options do you use, and when do you use them? 
2) If you use the machine in an office environment:  
   I have not the overview on every workflow in the box, can you provide 
   a little workflow diagram describing your optimal log in procedure for  
   your needs? 
 
BTW: I think at the SLES we have the boot options always visible...

Comment 2 Matthias Hopf 2005-10-11 09:46:53 UTC

This happens for all kind of uses. Typically when I have to boot in runlevel 3
in order to change the video driver (e.g. radeon vs. fglrx, in that case the
according kernel modules are not allowed to be loaded in advance, otherwise the
reconfiguration will fail).

Additions like acpis_slee=s3_bios, console=ttyS1, etc. for testing suspend.

Others which I only needed once for testing (like OpenGL needed mem=nopentium
once on AMD64).

Nice would be to be able to test different vga= options, unfortunately this is
not yet handled as later entries do not override former, and it is nontrivial to
change.

I only mentioned laptops, because on these machines I typically never can hit
the F2 key blind, which increases the annoyance a lot.

The optimal workflow was exactly like it worked with lilo or with the graphical
grub interface upto 9.3. Being able to boot the default selection in runlevel 3
by just pressing <3> <Return>. It would be perfectly allright for me if boot
options would only be displayed after some configuration variable has been changed.

That for SLES the boot options are always visible is nice, but not of major
concern for me, as with SLES 3D graphics has lower importance anyway.

Comment 3 Matthias Hopf 2006-01-02 10:24:00 UTC

Raising severity so it gets caught in SL 10.1

Comment 4 Matthias Hopf 2006-03-23 15:11:06 UTC

In all betas this issue is fixed. If the behavior is not to be changed for the final version, I think we can close this bug for good.

Comment 5 Siegfried Olschner 2006-03-23 15:34:41 UTC

OK - thx.