Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Máirín Duffy]

On 03/11/2013 05:13 PM, seth vidal wrote:
> Is one line of text really that significant of a problem to present?

I'm pretty sure it is because of where we are in the process at that
point. For example, translations - can we render Indic or CJK glyphs to
the screen at this point in the boot process? I'm not quite sure that's
possible? Another thing with translations is they take up additional
disk space and I think (don't quote me on this, maybe Peter or one of
the other grub experts could speak up) grub2 is a bit chubby compared to
grub, but its space usage is a concern so to not have to have all the
translation files for the languages we support would definitely be good.
(grub2's girth is one of the reasons - on upstream's recommendation -
that we don't allow installing the bootloader to a partition now.)

The other thing is that if you have to flash grub to display a message,
then you are flashing grub for everybody, which kind of defeats the
point of speeding up the boot process and making it look cleaner without
the black flashing screens in the background. (Does that make sense? It
seems everytime a new program loads in the beginning the screen kind of
blanks out and flashes inbetween. If we could skip displaying grub by
default then it'd eliminate two flashes)

I will say in the past, when asked to fix someone's Mac notebook (heaven
knows why they asked *me*), it was a real struggle to figure out what
the various bootup hotkeys were and when to trigger them to get into
various startup settings - they aren't documented very well by Apple or
so was the case some years ago. Also, different BIOSes have different F
keys you have to press to get into the startup disk settings - I
remember by the end of the 10 session Girl Scouts class I did in a lab
full of donated hardware (IBM, HP, Dell, and Gateway systems) I knew by
heart each one's hot key to get into the BIOS settings (and they were
annoyingly different for each system type!) So frustrating...

Anyway, this is why I like Ryan's idea of having a wide range of keys
you could press to enter it. (I usually start with Esc or F12 and go
from there.) If Esc, F1-F12, and maybe enter, space, ctrl, alt, and the
letters worked, that should be sufficient?

> Having multiple triggers for this sounds OK, but making all keys
> triggers for this sounds suboptimal, since you might "buttdial" the boot
> menu then, which sounds suboptimal. 

Lennart, what you're suggesting is if the user presses the appropriate
F-key too early, they'd end up in the BIOS menu instead of the GRUB
menu? Is that really that big of an issue - the type of users who'd want
to access GRUB are probably not going to be terrified by a BIOS menu
anyway, right? The problem with not using the F-keys is that I thought
grub traditionally used an F key (was it F3?) to get into if the timeout
was set to 0? (or am I misremembering?) Some BIOSes use F3 for the boot
menu, so those people would be at risk for buttdialing no matter what :)

~m