Bugzilla – Bug 118539
GRUB menu options become unusable
Last modified: 2005-10-14 08:58:45 UTC
If you interrupt the countdown in GRUB by using the arrow keys, the f2 menu and esc (to get to the console version of grub to edit boot parameters) become unusuable. As long as the countdown process is uninterrupted before hitting one of those keys, they will work.
This is gfxboot bug
Sorry, tried on some machines and couldn't reproduce this. And frankly, I don't see why it would make a difference which key is used. Did you configure some strange language, maybe?
This is a default install. Could it possibly be the keyboard on my laptop, since most laptops will have very proprietary hardware?
You are talking about grub specifically, NOT about the install cd?
I wasn't sure how to categorize the bug so I checked for other grub issues reported and noticed they were categorized under installation. However, this is with grub itself.
So it _does_ work with the install CD, but not later in the installed system?
The install cd appears to use isolinux, and this bug does not appear there. It appears with grub after it is installed.
Ok, I'll look into it if time permits for 10.1. Just to make sure: you have to use the arrow keys to trigger this, and the effect is that Esc & F-keys don't work (while arrow keys still do).
As far as I can see, the bug is triggered after hitting one of the up or down arrow keys, or it could simply be caused by changing the boot selection. Once the bug is triggered, the Esc and F-keys do not work while changing boot selection with the arrow keys appears to continue working. I can't tell if other keys fail or just aren't being triggered as with the graphical boot, I'm not being permitted to use "e", "a", or "c" to get to their respective options regardless of whether an arrow key was used or the selection was changed (this apparently requires leaving the graphical boot menu by hitting esc). I have created a vmware installation of SuSE. Once my SuSE 10 package arrives, I'm not gonna be able to do any more testing on my laptop for a while. If the vmware installation also displays this behavior, I can use that to continue testing for this bug. I'll check for the bug there and start looking for 10.1 prereleases.
You should be happy to know that my SuSE 10 package arrived and this appears to be fixed. Maybe an upgrade to grub to resolve another problem inadvertantly fixed this one?
I'm glad indeed. I suspected grub's keyboard handling code to interfere here. If the problems pops up again, just reopen this bug.