GUI boot (was: f17 and ATI RAGE128)

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 10:30 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2012/05/29 10:00 (GMT-0400) Adam Jackson composed:
> 
> > Graphical bootloader is not my favorite idea.
> 
> Even though I strongly prefer seeing legible white on black framebuffer text 
> kernel and init messages throughout the boot process, Gfxboot has always been 
> one of my favorite SuSE things, with cmdline sitting right there ready to 
> edit on every boot. Did the Grub devs really do something to v2 to make GUI 
> boot a problem Fedora can't handle?

The fault here isn't really with the grub developers. The problem is
simply that hardware (and firmware) sucks. There are several ways you
can ask a system what graphical modes it supports. Whichever way you
pick, some hardware will give you the wrong answer.

I'm not terribly familiar with gfxboot, but its wiki page -
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Gfxboot - says "gfxboot relies on the VESA
Video BIOS for setting a video mode". This means it will inevitably fail
on some hardware, just as grub2 currently does, unless it grows some
clever heuristics / exceptions. Because some hardware just has crap in
the VBE BIOS. See
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/701111/comments/4
for a pertinent example.

It sounds like grub2 graphical is about as likely to succeed in any
given config as gfxboot.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net