increasing grub timeout?

[Scott Robbins]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:24:32AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 09:18 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > >(Scott wrote)  :)

> > > For what it's worth, testing that this morning, I held down the shift
> > > key after booting and it still just booted with a 0 timeout.  So, I'm
> > > not sure that solution is universal. 
> 
> > Odd.  Every physical machine and virt machine I've tried it has worked.
> > I suppose if you held it down too early you may have triggered your
> > bios' stuck key loop.
> 
> On my partner's machine, the BIOS initializes the USB keyboard some time
> after boot. So the sequence is power on, wait some seconds while POST
> screen is displayed, during this time it prints some message about USB,
> only *after* that will any input from the keyboard be recognized. So if
> you just hit power and hold down a key, it won't register for any
> purpose.
> 
> I imagine there are other systems like that out there, and you wouldn't
> notice this if you used a PS/2 keyboard...

I tried it on a machine that uses a KVM with USB keyboard.  If that's
the case (that USB keyboards might give this error) I think the F8 key
is the errm, key.  That is, enough people use enough different systems
so that there's a reasonable chance that the shift key might not work. 

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the user shouldn't be asked to
have to time it perfectly.  Jesse's method, of randomly tapping F8, a
habit that we've all gained from helping our families with their
computer, seems not only more consistent, but more familiar to the MS
refugee.  
 

-- 
Scott Robbins
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