Martin Owens hat sich Gedanken über den sehr frühen Teil des Bootprozesses gemacht: “Grub2 Usability”
Hier mein Gedankendump dazu, den ich dort als Kommentar hinterlassen habe:
Here’s what I think:
- Present labels that identify what’s actually going to be booted (i.e. if it’s Ubuntu 9.10 that’s installed on that partition, then label it as such. If I can boot 9.10 with a kernel from 9.04 after a release-upgrade, it’s still 9.10).
- There exists a default kernel (/vmlinuz?) that is going to be booted when I select to boot an OS.
- Earlier kernels are not to be displayed by default, but available as an “advanced option” to a boot entry. One shouldn’t be able to accidently bring up that list of kernels as it just confuses people.
- I do not have to know that what I’m looking at is called grub (offer sensible boot options, don’t advertise your bootloader!), neither do I have to know its version number.
- Offer visual feedback when you’re doing something that could take a while (I have Lucid installed on an ancient and slow usb drive. If I select a boot entry and it goes to load the kernel, it’s taking 5 seconds before the kernel is even executed. During those 5 seconds I am currently presented a grub menu that appears to have locked up, thanks to the quiet-patches in Ubuntu. 5 seconds can be a long time if nothing appears to be happening). Don’t give me technical details on what you’re doing, “Starting…” or something similar is sufficient:
“Starting
Starting.
Starting..
Starting…
Starting
[…]”Just let me know that you’re working, not what you’re really doing because I don’t care a bit about that unless you’re broken.
Under normal circumstances I don’t care what kernels are installed, just have grub boot the most recent one. If a newly installed kernel fails to boot (which arguably shouldn’t happen in the first place), then provide means for grub to detect that failure and have it offer to boot the last known working kernel (only if I try to boot that installation again) and an explanation why it is offering that (“The last boot was unsuccessful. Do you want use the last known working configuration?”).This is also the only time I want grub to offer me something other than the default boot options. Don’t offer me a recovery boot option that boots into single user mode, this should be handled by the OS itself. It knows more about what’s actually failing and what it can offer you to do about it than grub. If it’s so broken that it can’t even do that anymore, there’s not even a point in offering a recovery boot option in grub since it won’t work anyway.If there is more than one installation of the same version of Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever, distinguish them by partition and/or fs-label. Otherwise, just call it what it is, e.g.:
- Ubuntu 9.10
- Fedora 12
- Windows XP
vs
- Ubuntu 9.10 (on first disk, second partition)
- Ubuntu 9.10 (on first disk, third partition)
- Fedora 12
- Windows XP
If there is only one OS installed, don’t display anything other than progress indication (see above) until the kernel is actually executed. The current approach to only show a boot menu when you hold down shift before/while grub starts is absolutely fine.Oh, and don’t present me something called “memtest86″. What are the chances I want to test my memory on every bootup (if at all)? You don’t offer me to run badblocks on my harddisks, so why memtest?I hope I made some sense
