Bugzilla – Bug 119645
Hiding boot options in graphical grub menu is suboptimal
Last modified: 2006-03-23 15:34:41 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.
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...
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.
Raising severity so it gets caught in SL 10.1
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.
OK - thx.