Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Casey Dahlin wrote: > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 08:01:54AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: >> And the main lesson her is "don't clutter the user interface with >> useless graphical eye candy". It makes the boot process require >> unnecessary system resources. The new Fedora installation setup is >> currently a *nightmare*. It works very poorly through low bandwidth >> remote connections, the graphics are poorly labeled and very >> confusing, and the "spoke and hub" model is a bit of big vision >> coneptual weirdness that is actively preventing people from wanting to >> touch Fedora. It's an *installer*, keeping it as lightweight and >> simple as possible with minimal graphics means that it will display >> better on small virtual system or remote KVM displays. But this has >> been discarded in favor or an overly bulky and complex system that is >> showing off what are quite fragile graphical features rather than >> simply doing the *job*. > > Citation needed. Anaconda has been graphical for ages, and has probably gotten > lighter after the rewrite if anything. > > --CJD There's a reason I've tended to use the "linux text" option, which has, unfortunately, all but been discarded or been made useless with curses based tools that no longer match the options of the X based GUI's. And lighter or not, the GUI still takes longer to load and to browse around, especially in poor quality graphical environments. We don't all hae a bit screen to play with, some of us are working through virtualization systems or remote KVM's with limited and burdensome graphical tools that the X based installer hinders. Try installing an older or vaguely recent Fedora with pure text mode or a serial console, especially when your remote site can't afford real remote KVM's and has a serial concentrator. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
I think this thread has run it's course... lets stop here, and those folks with concrete changes or proposals can work on those. I don't think we are adding much new to the debate at this point. kevin signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 14/03/13 01:52 PM, Reindl Harald wrote: Am 14.03.2013 21:50, schrieb Lennart Poettering: Well, then update your hardware That effectively means that *virtually all* laptops from 2013 on will POST in ridiculously short times. Really, just go to your computer store, and look for any laptop that is designed for Windows 8 WOW this is a ridiculus attitude fro a linux-developer most of us are using Linux because we DO NOT need new hardware each year and you propose ignorance of this fact? No, he didn't. Can we de-escalate the debate? Lennart did not really say "Everyone should be running hardware capable of POST-ing in two seconds or less". A few people asserted that they'd never seen such hardware, so Lennart cited some. The point is not that we must MAKE EVERYONE IN THE WORLD BUY NEW HARDWARE, it's that there really is hardware out there which POSTs very quickly and there is likely to be an increasing amount of such hardware in the future: therefore Lennart's concern with the five seconds spent at the grub screen is legitimate. His point does not require that everyone in the world have fast booting hardware, just that such hardware exist and be likely to become increasingly prevalent. 5 seconds at grub isn't worth worrying about if the rest of boot can be relied upon to take 40 seconds, as always used to be the case for just about everyone, but when there really are systems that can otherwise boot in 3 or 4 seconds, that 5 seconds becomes comparatively significant. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Am 14.03.2013 21:50, schrieb Lennart Poettering: > Well, then update your hardware > > That effectively means that *virtually all* laptops from 2013 on will > POST in ridiculously short times. > > Really, just go to your computer store, and look for any laptop that is > designed for Windows 8 WOW this is a ridiculus attitude fro a linux-developer most of us are using Linux because we DO NOT need new hardware each year and you propose ignorance of this fact? signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Lennart Poettering said: > Well, then update your hardware. As mentioned before, the Windows 8 > certification requires POST of < 2s on SSD, and < 4s on rotating media. Well, no. My hardware works just fine; I intend to use it for years to come. I really don't care about Windows 8 hardware (and apparently, neither does much of the computer market), so that is hardly a useful measuring stick. If this is all about optimizing for Windows 8 hardware, then IMHO that's a waste of time. -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 13.03.13 15:14, Chris Adams (cmad...@hiwaay.net) wrote: > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:52:23PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > > > That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different > > > measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be > > > something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). > > > > It's over a third of the boot time that Lennart's been discussing. > > I haven't seen systems that boot in less than 6 seconds (and by "boot" I > mean power-on to login prompt). Maybe they exist, but that is not my > experience with common hardware. Well, then update your hardware. As mentioned before, the Windows 8 certification requires POST of < 2s on SSD, and < 4s on rotating media. That effectively means that *virtually all* laptops from 2013 on will POST in ridiculously short times. For example the Samsung Series 9 ultrabooks POST in ~500ms, i.e. much better even than what Microsoft requires. Really, just go to your computer store, and look for any laptop that is designed for Windows 8, and check for yourself. Here's the link to the Windows 8 hw certification guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/hardware/hh748188 See page 118 of "Windows 8 System Requirements": "Systems with SSD or hybrid SSD must POST in 2 seconds or less. A hybrid SSD has both SSD storage and spinning disks." "Systems with spinning disks must POST in 4 seconds or less." Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 14/03/13 10:51 AM, Björn Persson wrote: Przemek Klosowski wrote: On 03/11/2013 05:03 PM, Björn Persson wrote: Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car? Windows? OS X? I don't have any of those, and I doubt I'll ever buy a car when I want a general-purpose computer. How do you know you don't have them? Well, OK, I suppose there *might* be a forgotten TV that has fallen down behind one of my bookshelves, but I really doubt it. I think I would remember if I had ever owned a TV. I do actually have a car-shaped money box, and it's true that it has never prompted me for a boot menu, but that's because there's no software in it, only bare metal. Those seats must be uncomfortable... -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Przemek Klosowski wrote: > On 03/11/2013 05:03 PM, Björn Persson wrote: > > >> Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car? > >> Windows? OS X? > > > > I don't have any of those, and I doubt I'll ever buy a car when I want > > a general-purpose computer. > > How do you know you don't have them? Well, OK, I suppose there *might* be a forgotten TV that has fallen down behind one of my bookshelves, but I really doubt it. I think I would remember if I had ever owned a TV. I do actually have a car-shaped money box, and it's true that it has never prompted me for a boot menu, but that's because there's no software in it, only bare metal. Björn Persson signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 05:03 PM, Björn Persson wrote: Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car? Windows? OS X? I don't have any of those, and I doubt I'll ever buy a car when I want a general-purpose computer. How do you know you don't have them? They don't show anything at boot, and run custom 'kiosk' environment. The only semi-consistent way of finding out is to go through their printed pamphlets and look for GPL: if it mentions GPL, it's probably Linux. Without any effort in that direction, my family currently owns a Linux TV, DVD player and network router/gateway, as well as several phones and computers. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Hi, On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 6:30 AM, Björn Persson wrote: > How about turning the messages that Plymouth needs to display into > pictures? There would be a set of pre-rendered image files with > translations of the phrase "Press Esc if you want to see what's going > on." for all the different locales, and the correct image for the > configured locale would be included when the initrd was generated. > Plymouth would then just put that picture up on the screen, not caring > about what language it's written in or with which font. Yea, we've talked about doing that before. We've also talked about querying the console font. So definitely possibilities to address the limitation. --Ray -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 18:05 +0100, Jan Dvořák wrote: > * Holding key on BIOS machines usually results in a long beep > sound and keyboard lockup. I never understood why. AIUI, key repetition and a very short buffer holding only a low number (16 I believe) of unprocessed key events. When the buffer filled up, the BIOS beeped and all following events were discarded. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:12:54PM +0100, Denys Vlasenko wrote: > +1 -1 Or in other words: This is not Google+, please don't quote entire emails. I do remember the AOL time. An argument can stand on itself without a popularity vote. -- Regards, Olav -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 03:37:23AM -0700, Dan Mashal wrote: > When I think of improving the booting experience tonight, I think of a > booter that can't repair itself when it's broken not Plymouth...can we > fix real broken things before we fix an annoying thing like plymouth? Of course we can. The code's available and you can attach patches in bugzilla. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 11:52 +0100, Denys Vlasenko wrote: > Intentionally dumbing down the system so that even idiots can use it > will result in *only* idiots using it. You should tone down your comments a little. Denigrating people who don't share knowledge about computers at a level similar to yours as idiots doesn't help your argument at all. In a similar vein, athletes might call you an unfit cripple if you don't keep up with them, butchers might deem you a timid wimp if you don't slaughter your own meat and artists might write you off as a blundering dolt who can't hold a brush straight if you're just an ordinary person who doesn't paint his own pictures. See how that doesn't help? > If you don't want to see boot menu, there is a way to switch it off. "If you want to see the boot menu, there's a way to switch it on." It's almost funny how those that can customize want their preferences as default, to the detriment of those who can't. You'd have a point if you argued "slippery slope" based on past performance where stuff was "dumbed down" -- in too many cases, configuration options vanishing from a UI were almost a death knell for the functionality behind them. However, power users and developers should not be the majority of users unless we actively want to keep Fedora reserved for an "elite" of developers and other IT-afficionados. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 09:09 -0400, Steve Clark wrote: > On 03/14/2013 07:06 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote: > > > On 03/11/2013 10:48 PM, Björn Persson wrote: > > > Lennart Poettering wrote: > > > > (And on EFI systems that do not initialize USB anymore during POST, you > > > > have to go through the OS to get into the boot loader anyway...) > > > That's going to be real fun when the OS fails to boot, and I can't fix > > > the boot because I can't get into the boot loader because the OS fails > > > to boot. > > +1 > > > Yeah Lennart what do you do then? If AIUI only the OS sets up USB, only the USB will be able to use it. Unless GRUB does its own USB setup, it simply doesn't matter in that case whether or not the GRUB menu is shown, if you can't type in it. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/14/2013 07:06 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote: On 03/11/2013 10:48 PM, Björn Persson wrote: Lennart Poettering wrote: (And on EFI systems that do not initialize USB anymore during POST, you have to go through the OS to get into the boot loader anyway...) That's going to be real fun when the OS fails to boot, and I can't fix the boot because I can't get into the boot loader because the OS fails to boot. +1 Yeah Lennart what do you do then? -- Stephen Clark *NetWolves* Director of Technology Phone: 813-579-3200 Fax: 813-882-0209 Email: steve.cl...@netwolves.com http://www.netwolves.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/14/2013 06:52 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote: On 03/11/2013 08:49 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote: On 03/11/2013 02:41 PM, Björn Persson wrote: Yes, why not display the Grub menu? Because it's the year 2013. Not 1999. Whether any text is displayed or not, there still needs to be a long enough pause that the user has time to press a key. Not displaying any text at all would make it harder to understand that the time to press that key is now. Many people won't even understand that they have an opportunity to press a key. Does any other computing device you own prompt you for a boot menu? Your mobile phone? Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car? My computer is not a mobile phone or car. I much prefer it to *not* become mobile phone-like cripple. Why is that? Could it be because a boot menu is not necessary for normal operation? A normal user doesn't need to wonder "Hey what kernel do I need to boot today?" every time their system boots. ...until something breaks. *Then* suddenly you discover that you _do_ need a way to see all this stuff (and more). If you are a developing developer and need to boot a different kernel or change kernel parameters then you know how to get into the boot menu -- on-screen prompts or no on-screen prompts. There is a time when developers need to distance themselves from user-interfaces and realize they are not the only user of the user-interface. This is one of those times. Intentionally dumbing down the system so that even idiots can use it will result in *only* idiots using it. If you don't want to see boot menu, there is a way to switch it off. This behavior can be made much easier to enable, if necessary - along the lines of "Don't ask me again" checkboxes. +1 -- Stephen Clark *NetWolves* Director of Technology Phone: 813-579-3200 Fax: 813-882-0209 Email: steve.cl...@netwolves.com http://www.netwolves.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/12/2013 02:33 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote: > On Tue, 12.03.13 09:13, Steve Clark (scl...@netwolves.com) wrote: > >> How many times do you boot your system each day? 10? Okay thats a >> whole 20 additional seconds. > > This is way up on my list of most non-sensical arguments about building > OSes, right next to "Linux is about choice". > > This bullshit about "boot times don't matter" is just entirely bogus, > and it doesn't get better by constant repitition. > > Fast boot times matter on desktops, Depends on what is "fast". 1-2 seconds during boot is not important on desktops. > they matter on embedded, they matter > on mobile, Yes. > they matter or servers Wrong. Servers can spare 5s of seconds. Normally, servers need reboots much less often than once a day. > Fast boot times save you time and energy. Phlease. > Fast boot times improve the first impression our OS makes on people. How about first impression an OS would do if it broke after upgrade and you need black magic to even _see_ where boot fails? > You know: *you* might not need fast boot. *Your* systems you might not > reboot only every other week. *Your* server system might have a very > slow BIOS POST. But we don't do this OS for *you* alone. Fedora has a > certain claim of universality. And that's why fast boot matters to > Fedora. I aqree that reasonably fast boot is good. I disagree that it should be instantaneous (by default) on desktops or laptops. Show "Press ESC to see boot menu" for one second before booting the default kernel. Fast enough. Clear enough. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Why is it so imtimidating / confusing to "noobs"? Dan On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, deep64blue wrote: > On Wed Mar 13 00:32:09 UTC 2013 Máirín Duffy wrote: > > "Displaying information geared towards power users by default is > intimidating / confusing to less-knowledgeable users." > > Surely if our target audience / user base is those who have a > capability / interest in contributing then we shouldn't be looking to > dumb the boot experience down - that would probably be a reasonable > choice for Mint or Ubuntu but I fail to see why it's a good one for > Fedora. > > Alan > -- > devel mailing list > devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/12/2013 01:07 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Lennart Poettering > wrote: >> On Mon, 11.03.13 13:08, Chris Murphy (li...@colorremedies.com) wrote: >> >>> On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:31 AM, Björn Persson >>> wrote: Or nothing at all displayed unless the user happens to know to press some key at the right moment? >>> >>> A multiboot system needs at least a message to inform the user how to >>> get to the boot manager (the GRUB menu). A Fedora only system probably >>> should entirely suppress the menu or notice how to get to it. >> >> Somebody who is capable of installing multiple operating systems on one >> machine should easily be savvy enough to remember that pressing >> shift/esc/space/f2/whatever gets him the boot menu. >> >> If you installed multiple OSes and noticed that the boot menu is gone, >> wouldn't pressing these keys be your natural reaction anyway? >> >> Lennart > > I've been a hardware evaluator. Absolutely not, because different > hardware components have different, and fundamentally unpredictable, > configuration keys. Hiding the particular configuration key for the > bootloader, that may be only work for a few seconds in a lengthy boot > process on, say, an HP high end controller with several disk > controller cards, is wasting the system engineer's time with repeated > reboots where *she can't tell when to push the escape button without > triggering the wrong configuration tool*. > > I would reject out of hand tools that did this. +1 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 10:48 PM, Björn Persson wrote: > Lennart Poettering wrote: >> (And on EFI systems that do not initialize USB anymore during POST, you >> have to go through the OS to get into the boot loader anyway...) > > That's going to be real fun when the OS fails to boot, and I can't fix > the boot because I can't get into the boot loader because the OS fails > to boot. +1 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 10:30 PM, Björn Persson wrote: > Lennart Poettering wrote: >> On Mon, 11.03.13 21:20, Björn Persson (bjorn@rombobjörn.se) wrote: >> >>> Peter Robinson wrote: It use to only be displayed if there was more than one OS configured or if the CTRL was held down. Having to press a particular key means you have to get it at the second or two where grub isn't displayed. The Ctrl option is quite nice as you can do it before the BIOS disappears. >>> >>> But how are users supposed to discover it? >> >> By hooking this up to keys people would natrually try, such as shift, >> space, enter, escape, or whatever windows does for their boot menu stuff. > > I would probably pound frantically on the keyboard trying to hit the > right key during some unknown, short interval. If there were no > interval at all and the right solution were to be holding a key at the > right moment, then I'd probably have about a 50% chance of not pressing > any key at that moment. > > And after I happened to press the right key at the right moment I still > wouldn't know which of the keys I pressed was the right one, so I'd > have to pound frantically the next time too. > > After a few iterations I'd also be cursing the idiots who designed such > an unfriendly user interface just because they didn't want any text on > the screen. +1 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 09:50 PM, Björn Persson wrote: > Chris Murphy wrote: >> A multiboot system needs at least a message to inform the user how to get to >> the boot manager (the GRUB menu). A Fedora only system probably should >> entirely suppress the menu or notice how to get to it. > > What if I need to revert to the previous kernel, or add some kernel > parameter to get the system up enough to solve some boot problem? > > Detecting that the previous boot failed is nice and all ...and impossible. System may be very sure it booted just fine. It can easily be completely unaware that display isn't actually displaying any image at all, because there is a tiny buglet in the new version of X or video driver. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 09:45 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Le Lun 11 mars 2013 21:16, Lennart Poettering a écrit : >> On Mon, 11.03.13 13:08, Chris Murphy (li...@colorremedies.com) wrote: >> >>> On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:31 AM, Björn Persson >>> wrote: Or nothing at all displayed unless the user happens to know to press >>> some key at the right moment? >>> >>> A multiboot system needs at least a message to inform the user how to >>> get to the boot manager (the GRUB menu). A Fedora only system probably >>> should entirely suppress the menu or notice how to get to it. >> >> Somebody who is capable of installing multiple operating systems on one >> machine should easily be savvy enough to remember that pressing >> shift/esc/space/f2/whatever gets him the boot menu. >> >> If you installed multiple OSes and noticed that the boot menu is gone, >> wouldn't pressing these keys be your natural reaction anyway? > > My natural reaction would be to curse whoever is making me waste minutes > in press-random-keys-to-see-if-you-can-unlock-boot games to "win" a few > seconds. I'm pretty sure any poll would find the same result. +1 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 09:20 PM, seth vidal wrote: > On Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:07:32 +0100 > Lennart Poettering wrote: >> >> I don't think we should generate any message. Nothing at all. My BIOS >> doesn't print a single line, and neither does the kernel if "quiet" is >> used (which is the default). I really don't see why Plymouth or the >> boot loader should print any more -- unless a real problem happens, >> or the user explicitly asked for more, or the boot takes very long. >> >> Entering the boot loader is something that is a debugging feature, a >> tool for professionals. It shouldn't be too hard to expect from them >> to remember something as simple as maybe "press shift or Space or >> Esc" to get the boot menu or more verbose output. I mean, honestly, >> that's probably what most people would try automatically anyway if >> they want feedback from the machine. > > I'm mostly concerned with making new professionals. > > We have to make the secret information discoverable if we want people > to poke and prod around. > > If the bioses and systems years ago had been opaque we wouldn't have > gotten this far. +1 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/11/2013 08:49 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote: > On 03/11/2013 02:41 PM, Björn Persson wrote: >> Yes, why not display the Grub menu? > > Because it's the year 2013. Not 1999. > >> Whether any text is displayed or not, there still needs to be a long >> enough pause that the user has time to press a key. Not displaying any >> text at all would make it harder to understand that the time to press >> that key is now. Many people won't even understand that they have an >> opportunity to press a key. > > Does any other computing device you own prompt you for a boot menu? Your > mobile phone? Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car? My computer is not a mobile phone or car. I much prefer it to *not* become mobile phone-like cripple. > Why is that? Could it be because a boot menu is not necessary for normal > operation? A normal user doesn't need to wonder "Hey what kernel do I > need to boot today?" every time their system boots. ...until something breaks. *Then* suddenly you discover that you _do_ need a way to see all this stuff (and more). > If you are a developing developer and need to boot a different kernel or > change kernel parameters then you know how to get into the boot menu -- > on-screen prompts or no on-screen prompts. > > There is a time when developers need to distance themselves from > user-interfaces and realize they are not the only user of the > user-interface. This is one of those times. Intentionally dumbing down the system so that even idiots can use it will result in *only* idiots using it. If you don't want to see boot menu, there is a way to switch it off. This behavior can be made much easier to enable, if necessary - along the lines of "Don't ask me again" checkboxes. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Björn Persson wrote: > Ray Strode wrote: >> We start plymouth in the initrd, and we >> don't have fonts, translations, font rendering libraries or anything >> in the initrd. we could ship those things in the initrd but it would >> make the initrd substantially larger. > > How about turning the messages that Plymouth needs to display into > pictures? There would be a set of pre-rendered image files with > translations of the phrase "Press Esc if you want to see what's going > on." for all the different locales, and the correct image for the > configured locale would be included when the initrd was generated. > Plymouth would then just put that picture up on the screen, not caring > about what language it's written in or with which font. > > The passphrase prompt could be handled the same way. Instead of just a > picture of a padlock there would be a picture with a translation of > "Enter the disk encryption passphrase." > > Are there other messages that Plymouth may need to display? I would > guess there aren't so many that the scalability of this approach would > be a problem. > > Björn Persson > > -- > devel mailing list > devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel When I think of improving the booting experience tonight, I think of a booter that can't repair itself when it's broken not Plymouth...can we fix real broken things before we fix an annoying thing like plymouth? -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Ray Strode wrote: > We start plymouth in the initrd, and we > don't have fonts, translations, font rendering libraries or anything > in the initrd. we could ship those things in the initrd but it would > make the initrd substantially larger. How about turning the messages that Plymouth needs to display into pictures? There would be a set of pre-rendered image files with translations of the phrase "Press Esc if you want to see what's going on." for all the different locales, and the correct image for the configured locale would be included when the initrd was generated. Plymouth would then just put that picture up on the screen, not caring about what language it's written in or with which font. The passphrase prompt could be handled the same way. Instead of just a picture of a padlock there would be a picture with a translation of "Enter the disk encryption passphrase." Are there other messages that Plymouth may need to display? I would guess there aren't so many that the scalability of this approach would be a problem. Björn Persson signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:20:21AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > It's unfortunately demoware. While the LinuxBIOS project has optimized > BIOS on a few systrems, server grade hardware can take up to five > minutes simply to get past all the Power-On-Self-Test operations. And > just because the "Windows logo" is up does not mean the system is > actually for another few minutes, while slow and but unreported Hi, I'm not talking about demoware or servers: I said on a laptop and that it is a realistic future. Basically need a Windows logo laptop and no LVM. Servers and multiple OS'es is something different. -- Regards, Olav -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Olav Vitters wrote: > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 03:14:01PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: >> I haven't seen systems that boot in less than 6 seconds (and by "boot" I >> mean power-on to login prompt). Maybe they exist, but that is not my >> experience with common hardware. > > At FOSDEM they demonstrated 2 seconds for kernel + userspace. Userspace > being GDM. The initialization of the presenter took longer than the > kernel+userspace bit, so they had to use a camera to actually show this. > The firmware on that laptop took about 7 seconds. As Lennart mentioned > elsewhere, new laptops must do less than 2 seconds to get that nice > Windows logo, some do 0.5 seconds. > > So laptop booting to GDM in 2.5 - 4 seconds after pressing the power > button is realistic. > > 350MB video of the presentation: > http://video.fosdem.org/2013/maintracks/Janson/systemd,_Two_Years_Later.webm > > The demonstration is at the beginning. It's unfortunately demoware. While the LinuxBIOS project has optimized BIOS on a few systrems, server grade hardware can take up to five minutes simply to get past all the Power-On-Self-Test operations. And just because the "Windows logo" is up does not mean the system is actually for another few minutes, while slow and but unreported operations go on unknown to the user, operations that may prevent normal login. These include hard drive indexing, VPN activation, DHCP configuration in a not-well-configured network environment, etc. It's not "up" until the user is logged in or critical background services, such as web servers or file servers, are up and available for service, and that takes much more than showing that icon. Fedora 18 is suffering similar issues with the new Gnome interface: login is now *slow* with overwhelming clusters of undesired and unhelpful graphical clutter. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Mar 13, 2013, at 4:56 PM, Mike Pinkerton wrote: > > On 13 Mar 2013, at 14:51, Chris Murphy wrote: > >>> >>> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get >>> to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? >> >> Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc. > > > My question was more timing than keystroke -- whatever the keystroke, I don't > think I can hit it in the 1 second boot scenario. Apple's litany of key shortcuts is related to the lack of a firmware setup menu, and probably why there's some boot delay. This delay seems to get longer with more, or stale, NVRAM entries, but still has been faster, until recently, than BIOS hardware. >> On 13 Mar 2013, at 13:39, Matthew Garrett wrote: >> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? >>> >>> Use UI that sets an EFI variable and then reboot. > > > If I understand this correctly, I have to log into a working system in order > to set a flag in the firmware that will allow me to reboot into the firmware > set-up program. I don't know that the firmware OEMs, or Microsoft, envision entering the firmware setup as a means of troubleshooting a broken system. > > I'm not yet sold on having to boot into a working system in order to get back > to the firmware or boot menu on a reboot. Beyond the annoyance of having to > boot something I don't want in order to get where I want to go, the process > seems fragile to me. I'm not quite following the lack of USB initialization during UEFI boot services, but presumably an add-on boot manager (or even the firmware setup utility which is just a uefi boot application) could load a USB driver. In your case you'd have an NVRAM entry instructing the built-in UEFI boot manager to execute a boot manager other than the Windows one, such as GRUB, gummiboot, or rEFInd. Then it's up to how they're configured whether you see a menu and what's in that menu. In the case of GRUB as the boot manager, I can configure it to hide the menu, replacing it with a countdown timer instead, upon timeout the default entry boots immediately or I can interrupt the countdown (only with ESC) and cause the menu to appear. Chris Murphy -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 13 Mar 2013, at 14:51, Chris Murphy wrote: By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc. My question was more timing than keystroke -- whatever the keystroke, I don't think I can hit it in the 1 second boot scenario. On 13 Mar 2013, at 13:39, Matthew Garrett wrote: By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? Use UI that sets an EFI variable and then reboot. If I understand this correctly, I have to log into a working system in order to set a flag in the firmware that will allow me to reboot into the firmware set-up program. I'm not yet sold on having to boot into a working system in order to get back to the firmware or boot menu on a reboot. Beyond the annoyance of having to boot something I don't want in order to get where I want to go, the process seems fragile to me. Perhaps with age comes patience -- or orneriness, I'm not quite sure -- but I'm inclined to think that accepting the addition of 1-2 seconds to boot time in order to have available a power-on key-hold route to a boot menu and firmware set-up program is not a particularly bad trade-off. -- Mike -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 03:14:01PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > I haven't seen systems that boot in less than 6 seconds (and by "boot" I > mean power-on to login prompt). Maybe they exist, but that is not my > experience with common hardware. At FOSDEM they demonstrated 2 seconds for kernel + userspace. Userspace being GDM. The initialization of the presenter took longer than the kernel+userspace bit, so they had to use a camera to actually show this. The firmware on that laptop took about 7 seconds. As Lennart mentioned elsewhere, new laptops must do less than 2 seconds to get that nice Windows logo, some do 0.5 seconds. So laptop booting to GDM in 2.5 - 4 seconds after pressing the power button is realistic. 350MB video of the presentation: http://video.fosdem.org/2013/maintracks/Janson/systemd,_Two_Years_Later.webm The demonstration is at the beginning. -- Regards, Olav -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 2013-03-13 12:51 (GMT-0600) Chris Murphy composed: By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc. I've found DEL to be far and away most common found on retail packaged motherboards with Award BIOS, very common on those with AMI BIOS. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 9:12 PM, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, drago01 said: >> Seems like you are used to slow boots. >> Watch (or even use) a system with non rotating media (i.e SSDs) that >> does not have a ton of crap set up to be started on boot and you will >> notice this "1 or 2 seconds" as significant. > > My main home system has an SSD, and I'd be hard-pressed to notice one > second out of the boot process (although I don't reboot it often, since > I just suspend-to-RAM). > > I don't find saving 1-2 seconds compelling enough to disable the > end-user from interrupting the boot process to choose alternate kernels, > kernel options, etc. Unless you have a 100% fail-proof method of > detecting failed boots, you're just setting up a system where a stuck > boot is unrecoverable without additional resources (such as a rescue > CD). I do have my laptop configured that way and I do not live in fear of my system suddenly not booting up because of an update. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:52:23PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > > That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different > > measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be > > something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). > > It's over a third of the boot time that Lennart's been discussing. I haven't seen systems that boot in less than 6 seconds (and by "boot" I mean power-on to login prompt). Maybe they exist, but that is not my experience with common hardware. -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, drago01 said: > Seems like you are used to slow boots. > Watch (or even use) a system with non rotating media (i.e SSDs) that > does not have a ton of crap set up to be started on boot and you will > notice this "1 or 2 seconds" as significant. My main home system has an SSD, and I'd be hard-pressed to notice one second out of the boot process (although I don't reboot it often, since I just suspend-to-RAM). I don't find saving 1-2 seconds compelling enough to disable the end-user from interrupting the boot process to choose alternate kernels, kernel options, etc. Unless you have a 100% fail-proof method of detecting failed boots, you're just setting up a system where a stuck boot is unrecoverable without additional resources (such as a rescue CD). -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:52 PM, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: >> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 01:28:36PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: >> > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: >> > > Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly >> > > slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. >> > >> > How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? >> >> On the order of a second or two. > > That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different > measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be > something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). Seems like you are used to slow boots. Watch (or even use) a system with non rotating media (i.e SSDs) that does not have a ton of crap set up to be started on boot and you will notice this "1 or 2 seconds" as significant. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:52:23PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 01:28:36PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > > > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > > > Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly > > > > slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. > > > > > > How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? > > > > On the order of a second or two. > > That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different > measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be > something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). Is 150% longer time "significant"? -- Tomasz TorczTo co nierealne -- tutaj jest normalne. xmpp: zdzich...@chrome.pl Ziomale na życie mają tu patenty specjalne. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 02:52:23PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > > How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? > > > > On the order of a second or two. > > That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different > measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be > something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). It's over a third of the boot time that Lennart's been discussing. > > How much detail would you like for the > > second question? > > Well, it seems like 1-2 seconds is a long time just to check, but that > was a rhetorical question. USB wasn't designed for rapid initialisation and enumeration. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:14:05AM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote: > On 03/13/2013 09:23 AM, Ian Malone wrote: > > Then you have good students. Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main > > target audience now? I'm really not sure what it is anymore. > > Is there any good reason to exclude them? > > I started using Linux (Red Hat 5.1) as a 3rd year high school student. My first thought was (think 5.0, at that time people called it the most buggy release ever:P): this stuff is complicated! Reasoning: You want to finally try out this Linux, and even in just one second you have to spend effort to figure out what it is doing. It gave the impression of a steep learning curve and that I maybe should've bought a book first (considered a book as expensive thing and not sure of the benefit). Of course things changed a lot since then. -- Regards, Olav -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 01:28:36PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > > Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly > > > slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. > > > > How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? > > On the order of a second or two. That doesn't seem all that significant to me; I guess we have different measures (to me "significantly slow down the boot process" would be something on the order of 5-10 seconds or more). > How much detail would you like for the > second question? Well, it seems like 1-2 seconds is a long time just to check, but that was a rhetorical question. -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 01:28:36PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > > Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly > > slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. > > How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? On the order of a second or two. How much detail would you like for the second question? -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Mar 13, 2013, at 10:52 AM, Mike Pinkerton wrote: > > Let me make a case for an Apple approach. Although the reaction here was > somewhat dismissive of the various start-up keys that Apple enables, the > Apple approach does have three great advantages: Those advantages come in part due to them being implemented in the firmware, not a stand alone boot manager which is what Fedora would need to rely on to have similar functionality. A 3rd party (U)EFI Boot Manager (GRUB, gummiboot, rEFInd) is a boot application initiated by the native one. So the windows of opportunity for pressing keys becomes much more fine grained. For BIOS it may be even more limited. > > 1. In the most frequent case, there is no interruption of the boot sequence > for the default system. > > 2. If one wants to invoke one of the Apple start-up options, the normal > practice is to hold down the appropriate key, then power on the Mac, and > continue holding down the key until one hears the start-up chime and sees > that the system is booting. There is no short time interval that one has to > hit just right. It's true that it's quite tolerant, even registering a 1-1.5 seconds after the startup chime. But this also is a function of the firmware's boot manager. The keys chosen must not conflict with keys chosen by the firmware OEM. > > > 3. The key combinations are well-known. Decades of using the same key > combinations have ingrained them in Mac culture. This is why I suggest cooperation among distributions and boot managers, via BootLoaderSpec, to agree on the function of keys. It should be ingrained linux culture, ideally, not merely Fedora. If the boot manager is hidden by default, the boot manager isn't knowable to the user, so differing keyboard shortcuts to functionality causes a huge mess. "Well it's F on Fedora GRUB, but B on gummiboot and rEFInd, and U for Ubuntu GRUB, and …" now we need a decoder ring. Not good for linux IMO. Also, avoiding conflict with the native boot manager is needed. Clearly on Macs, the 3rd party boot manager can't use command-V, N, T, C, command-S, shift, option/alt, and so on. Other firmware OEMs presumably have their own reserved keys. So the add-on boot manager can't use those or the user will invariably trigger the feature for the native boot manager not the add-on boot manager. > > By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to > the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc. Chris Murphy -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 02:45 PM, Chris Adams wrote: Sorry, I have not seen it "rehashed many times" in this thread, but maybe I missed a bunch of messages. Then for consistency, treat single-boot (with multiple kernel options) the same as dual-boot. There's not enough gain to justify extra code to handle single-boot vs. dual-boot. Before the introduction of GRUB2, we had no timeout for non-dual boot systems and a timeout was added for dual boot systems and it was that way for a few releases. So none of these conversations seem to be adding anything new. This part of the thread is basically a giant rehash. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Rahul Sundaram said: > On 03/13/2013 02:33 PM, Chris Adams wrote: > >Also, dropping the boot loader menu might be okay for single-OS > >systems (I'm not convinced, but whatever). What about dual-boot? If I > >tell someone running Windows to try Fedora to see Linux in action, > >they are not going to be very happy if, after installing, there's no > >obvious way to boot back to their "normal" Windows install. > > That has been rehashed many times already. If it is a dual boot system, > the GRUB menu will have a timeout. Sorry, I have not seen it "rehashed many times" in this thread, but maybe I missed a bunch of messages. Then for consistency, treat single-boot (with multiple kernel options) the same as dual-boot. There's not enough gain to justify extra code to handle single-boot vs. dual-boot. -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 02:33 PM, Chris Adams wrote: Also, dropping the boot loader menu might be okay for single-OS systems (I'm not convinced, but whatever). What about dual-boot? If I tell someone running Windows to try Fedora to see Linux in action, they are not going to be very happy if, after installing, there's no obvious way to boot back to their "normal" Windows install. That has been rehashed many times already. If it is a dual boot system, the GRUB menu will have a timeout. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Lennart Poettering said: > A system with a slow boot can be used in many applications. A system > with a fast boot can be used in all those plus many more. > > It's not that hard to see, is it? Well, yeah, what are the "many more" applications made possible by a system that saves a couple of seconds per boot? Also, dropping the boot loader menu might be okay for single-OS systems (I'm not convinced, but whatever). What about dual-boot? If I tell someone running Windows to try Fedora to see Linux in action, they are not going to be very happy if, after installing, there's no obvious way to boot back to their "normal" Windows install. -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett said: > Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly > slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. How long is "significantly"? How hard is it to check for a keypress? -- Chris Adams Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 13 March 2013 11:05, Chris Murphy wrote: > > On Mar 13, 2013, at 7:42 AM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > >> > I do. Curious, isn't it, how I managed to stumble into linux boot >> > loading, and file systems of all things, never having a single >> > chance of seeing such things? They weren't merely hidden from me. >> > They didn't even exist. >> >> Well good for you, but why make it harder than it needs to be? > > I don't see the correlation. Exactly what information is provided by the GRUB > menu that makes it easier for people to become involved in linux boot loading? > > I don't understand your argument in lieu of Fedora versions prior to 16 > suppressing the GRUB menu by default. In pretty much every case I had to turn it off.. usually via by a USB rescue mode or a reinstall. In any case this is also my last email on this thread. Do whatever you guys do, you have had my input/opinion and since I am not doing the work I am getting out of the way. -- Stephen J Smoogen. "Don't derail a useful feature for the 99% because you're not in it." Linus Torvalds "Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me." —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Mar 13, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote: >>> > On 03/13/2013 11:26 AM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: >> Because maybe your computer boots just fine but you're screens are all >> garbled or just black. > > This is a really good point. In this situation I probably would have > just gone to a tty and edited the grub conf file to default to an older > kernel if that happened, rather than play whack-a-mole with the grub > timeout. Garbled video is an edge case, but it's a realistic one for any distribution that aggressively pushes new kernels. When changing video resolutions, the same thing could happen. At the time the resolution changes, at least on Gnome, Windows, OS X, a dialog appears with options to Accept or Revert the change, Revert as a default, as well as a timer. If the user doesn't explicitly accept the change with a mouse click, the change is rejected just in case the video is garbled. Perhaps something similar can be leveraged for a one time boot, just to ensure at least video is functioning? Chris Murphy -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:52:24PM -0400, Mike Pinkerton wrote: > I recall there was some objection about BIOS buffer clearing, and > don't know what problems that would present to this proposal. On > the plus side, though, there wouldn't be any need for gnarly auto- > detection of error conditions. Worse than that, having grub check for a held key will significantly slow down the boot process even if there's no key being held. > By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected > to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? Use UI that sets an EFI variable and then reboot. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Tue, 12.03.13 21:50, Felix Miata (mrma...@earthlink.net) wrote: > On 2013-03-12 14:33 (GMT+0100) Lennart Poettering composed: > > >Fast boot times ... increase reliability, and > > How? Shorter downtimes if things go wrong? You are back again at full redundancy if you needed the redundancy? You know, those managers love the 9's after 99.9% reliability... > >applicability. > > What? A system with a slow boot can be used in many applications. A system with a fast boot can be used in all those plus many more. It's not that hard to see, is it? Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Mar 13, 2013, at 7:42 AM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > > I do. Curious, isn't it, how I managed to stumble into linux boot > > loading, and file systems of all things, never having a single > > chance of seeing such things? They weren't merely hidden from me. > > They didn't even exist. > > Well good for you, but why make it harder than it needs to be? I don't see the correlation. Exactly what information is provided by the GRUB menu that makes it easier for people to become involved in linux boot loading? I don't understand your argument in lieu of Fedora versions prior to 16 suppressing the GRUB menu by default. Chris Murphy -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:52:24 -0400 Mike Pinkerton wrote: > + If a user could hold the key down from before power on until the > boot options menu appeared, then Fedora could still do extremely fast > booting without presenting the user with a short time interval to > hit. If grub finds the keyboard, and detects no "F" key hold down, > it would continue to boot immediately with no further delay. There are at least two problems with that: * Holding key over remote VNC console can be problematic, especially if the server POSTs slowly. * Holding key on BIOS machines usually results in a long beep sound and keyboard lockup. I never understood why. And again, I would like to add that servers tend to change video mode during POST, sometimes even several times. On some chassis this results to losing video output for several (think 2) seconds. That means that even showing a brief [press F for options] sucks. signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 13 Mar 2013, at 10:16, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot sequence. There have been a number of suggestions that have taken a Windows 8 approach to this problem -- auto-detecting error conditions or enabling one to "reboot" into a boot menu. I can't say that I'm confident of the error detection, or that I'm happy about having to boot once into the "wrong" system just so I can "reboot" into a boot menu that will enable me to boot into the "right" system. That doesn't seem particularly efficient or user- friendly. Let me make a case for an Apple approach. Although the reaction here was somewhat dismissive of the various start-up keys that Apple enables, the Apple approach does have three great advantages: 1. In the most frequent case, there is no interruption of the boot sequence for the default system. 2. If one wants to invoke one of the Apple start-up options, the normal practice is to hold down the appropriate key, then power on the Mac, and continue holding down the key until one hears the start- up chime and sees that the system is booting. There is no short time interval that one has to hit just right. Like big icons on the edge of the screen, holding down a key from power on provides the fattest target for a user to hit -- sort of Fitts law in a temporal dimension. 3. The key combinations are well-known. Decades of using the same key combinations have ingrained them in Mac culture. A new Mac user might not know the right key combination, but any mailing list or forum will have dozens of Mac users who can quickly recite the key combinations for starting from a CD or DVD, clearing the PRAM (a long- time voodoo practice among some Mac users), starting target disk mode, etc. In the case of Fedora: + If a key were selected -- and I don't think you have to enable all of them -- and advertised in all of the user mailing lists, fora, Quick Start documentation, Installation Guide, User Guide, etc., then within a year or so just about every Fedoran would know and could quickly recite to newbies "hold down the F (as in Fedora) key to get to advanced boot options." + If a user could hold the key down from before power on until the boot options menu appeared, then Fedora could still do extremely fast booting without presenting the user with a short time interval to hit. If grub finds the keyboard, and detects no "F" key hold down, it would continue to boot immediately with no further delay. I recall there was some objection about BIOS buffer clearing, and don't know what problems that would present to this proposal. On the plus side, though, there wouldn't be any need for gnarly auto- detection of error conditions. By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs? -- Mike -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed 13 Mar 2013 12:19:39 PM EDT, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > This is no luck, you are using the exact class of hardware @rh dev use, > which is pretty much the safest setup for Fedora (and it's not the least > expensive hardware on the market either). This is my last message to this thread. I am not using the same exact class of hardware that Red Hat developers use. Since 2008 or so I've been using convertible wacom tablet / laptops made by Lenovo - my first was the x61T, now I'm using an x220T. And the x220T, while it works great, spews out a lot of annoying acpi errors whenever I suspend / unsuspend / boot that I'd really not like to see and I'm sure I wouldn't see if more developers were using the same model. The developers I sit with do not all use Thinkpads. Many have Dell or HP laptops or desktop boxes. The hardware isn't as homogeneous as it was back in 2004-2005, the standard issue IBM Thinkpad days. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 17:00, Máirín Duffy a écrit : > It's been a really long time since a kernel update broke something on my > system as well. I think the last time might have been around F14, there > had been a kernel update that broke suspend on my Thinkpad x61. A fix > came out shortly after. Anyway, the infrequency of the kernel breaking > me (and maybe we are both really lucky for this) This is no luck, you are using the exact class of hardware @rh dev use, which is pretty much the safest setup for Fedora (and it's not the least expensive hardware on the market either). -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 16:52, Máirín Duffy a écrit : >>> From: Máirín Duffy >>> Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with >>> other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather >>> than separating it out for access only in a completely different >>> context? > > On 03/13/2013 11:26 AM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: >> Because maybe your computer boots just fine but you're screens are all >> garbled or just black. > > This is a really good point. In this situation I probably would have > just gone to a tty and edited the grub conf file to default to an older > kernel if that happened, rather than play whack-a-mole with the grub > timeout. Just trying to point out that you can solve this issue without > entering grub at boot-time. Máirín, When the gfx driver puts the gpu in such a state, tty is often garbled too. It uses the same hardware. -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 11:46 AM, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote: > This brings the question, how do you do your update? I actually do updates via the package kit nag thing that pops up from the messaging tray, and I rarely pay attention to the list of packages. I just don't have the time to bother, and if that's the default experience (and it is at least for GNOME desktop users) I want to experience it so I understand it, if that makes sense. > I know I'm not he average user but I update via yum and one thing I > always watch out for are kernel update, mostly because it means I'll > have to reboot my machine sometime after that. > So when I reboot and something does not come up, I will likely pretty > quickly reboot on an older kernel to see if that's what has changed (I > must confess, this is a guess since I don't remember when is the last > time something broke on one of my machine with a kernel update). I'm not a great troubleshooter, unfortunately! I'm trying to use Fedora to design stuff, not to play around with the OS. :) It's been a really long time since a kernel update broke something on my system as well. I think the last time might have been around F14, there had been a kernel update that broke suspend on my Thinkpad x61. A fix came out shortly after. Anyway, the infrequency of the kernel breaking me (and maybe we are both really lucky for this) is probably another reason why I think 'check network manager' before I think 'try another kernel' for this example situation. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 11:51 AM, Felix Miata wrote: On 2013-03-13 17:29 (GMT+0200) Sebastian Mäki composed: * remove the hood of the car, and keep it off in case something goes wrong, or to entice new drivers to look in there and guess what is going on. * keep the hood of the car on, and if something goes wrong, pop it. If the driver wants to tweak, or have a look around let them pull the lever and pop the hood. I was pretty much unable to do anything when my hood release froze this winter. The only way to get under the hood and fix a problem with starting the car was to wait for warmer weather. No amount of waiting within my expected lifetime would have helped me. The battery died, and the hood cable broke at the latch. No amount of sheet metal disassembly was possible with the hood latched, even after removing the grill. I had to go find a similar car to study its latch mechanism, then squeeze in between the puddle and the bottom of the car and reach up with a big screwdriver to fram on the latch mechanism until I got lucky and hit the right spot to make it release. My kind of engineer!! We fix anything!! -- Regards, OldFart -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 11:04 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> On 03/13/2013 10:57 AM, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > I'm with you that users shouldn't see this by default, but rather e.g.
> > upon encountering an error condition (or if configured differently).
> > However, we still could use better wording for such a message, even if
> > we restrict ourselves to English, e.g.: "Press if you want to
> > change how your system starts." That's hardly in the league of Japanese
> > for someone not speaking it.
>
> Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with
> other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather
> than separating it out for access only in a completely different context?
>
> I mean, I 100% agree if you can't boot, it should pop up automatically.
>
> But for cases where you've booted into the machine and just noticed your
> network doesn't work - we don't automatically notice if the network
> isn't working and reboot into the boot options screen, and I'm not sure
> if that would make any sense because there's more reasons the network
> might not be working besides a new broken kernel update.
Right, sorry I got distracted by the wording thing which is mostly a
side-show anyway.
> In that situation my first instinct would be to go into the control
> panel and poke around and see if there was something I could fix there,
> and maybe search online for an answer. My first instinct would not be to
> reboot the system and go into the bootloader menu - it's not intuitive
> that the problem happened because of a new kernel, and usually when I
> find myself in that situation it really does take me a while to think it
> might be a new kernel with a broken driver. I mean, it could be other
> things too - for example, my network card could be turned off in network
> manager (has happened before, when i turned off wireless after a plane
> trip).
>
> If I just wanted to explore my options with configuring the computer, I
> would also go to the control panel first to poke around - again I
> wouldn't think to reboot the system and poke around with the menus
> there, I really feel it's not intuitive to configure a particular system
> before the system is even loaded, if that makes sense?
I'm not 100% sure about the ideal way of booting, considering all the
conflicting requirements (easy, pretty, fast, reliable,
deterministic, ...). In contrast however, I feel very confident that
right now discovering what options are available should you need them is
lacking. Using general purpose search engines to find out such
information -- before or after disaster strikes -- isn't something I'd
like as the only way to find this out. Too often you find pages that
deal with something similar, but not quite what you're looking for. Then
you find forum threads were a number of people with "dangerous
half-knowledge" discuss about the best way to "fix" sound/SELinux/...
which is switching it (be that pulseaudio, or SELinux, ...) off since
that's what worked in 2004. Neither is pointing people to
#fedora/freenode I'm afraid. Nor is advertising the boot menu during
boot for that matter -- can anyone say "Clippy"?
I imagine that some kind of well discoverable (e.g. advertised during
installation, or in the default browser homepage) knowledge-base beyond
installation guides, release notes e.a. could get us a far way, which
would have vetted information about troubleshooting ("So you updated and
sound/wireless/suspend broke? Here's what you should check and
how: ...") and power-user-ing ("So we welded the hood in Fedora a little
too shut for your taste? While we're busy munching self-baked cookies by
the thankful Aunt Tilly, here's how you gnaw the hood open again: ...").
That this needs a little cooperation on the OS components side is
obvious, workarounds for power users either need to stay stable, be
replaced by something more or less equivalent (with updated
documentation), or rendered obsolete.
Nils
--
Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase
Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
>> From: Máirín Duffy >> Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with >> other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather >> than separating it out for access only in a completely different context? On 03/13/2013 11:26 AM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > Because maybe your computer boots just fine but you're screens are all > garbled or just black. This is a really good point. In this situation I probably would have just gone to a tty and edited the grub conf file to default to an older kernel if that happened, rather than play whack-a-mole with the grub timeout. Just trying to point out that you can solve this issue without entering grub at boot-time. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 2013-03-13 17:29 (GMT+0200) Sebastian Mäki composed: * remove the hood of the car, and keep it off in case something goes wrong, or to entice new drivers to look in there and guess what is going on. * keep the hood of the car on, and if something goes wrong, pop it. If the driver wants to tweak, or have a look around let them pull the lever and pop the hood. I was pretty much unable to do anything when my hood release froze this winter. The only way to get under the hood and fix a problem with starting the car was to wait for warmer weather. No amount of waiting within my expected lifetime would have helped me. The battery died, and the hood cable broke at the latch. No amount of sheet metal disassembly was possible with the hood latched, even after removing the grill. I had to go find a similar car to study its latch mechanism, then squeeze in between the puddle and the bottom of the car and reach up with a big screwdriver to fram on the latch mechanism until I got lucky and hit the right spot to make it release. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 11:04 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote: > In that situation my first instinct would be to go into the control > panel and poke around and see if there was something I could fix > there, and maybe search online for an answer. My first instinct would > not be to reboot the system and go into the bootloader menu - it's not > intuitive that the problem happened because of a new kernel, and > usually when I find myself in that situation it really does take me a > while to think it might be a new kernel with a broken driver. This brings the question, how do you do your update? I know I'm not he average user but I update via yum and one thing I always watch out for are kernel update, mostly because it means I'll have to reboot my machine sometime after that. So when I reboot and something does not come up, I will likely pretty quickly reboot on an older kernel to see if that's what has changed (I must confess, this is a guess since I don't remember when is the last time something broke on one of my machine with a kernel update). Pierre -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
>> On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy wrote: >>> No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban >>> legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban >>> legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual >>> computer users? On 03/13/2013 11:30 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > 20 years+ of experience with Linux and more with other OSes :-) Ah, okay, so you *are* completely ill-equipped to understand a casual user's experience then? > And how did it impact their usage experience? I guess, their reaction > was a "Wazat?", temporary "raising the eyebrow", but then they simply > went on. Actually, in some students cases, their reaction was to simply plug out their live USB stick, boot into windows, and try to create their project on there. Not exactly the kind of reaction we'd like to see, is it? > Actually, I would expect your students to have more issues with > understanding "keyboard layout" selection, "timezones" selection, > explaining "hw-clock", the concepts behind "updates"/rpm-conflicts and > so on and would consider the bootloader prompt to have been one > (ignorable) detail amongst many other much huger problem. Nope, the live media were pre-configured for their keyboard layouts and timezone, and all of the software they needed was pre-installed. They did have issues getting Flash to work, but that's not really something we can do much about. > > One experiment I did: I sat some relatives and friends (no computer > iliterates) in front of Gnome3 and asked them to work with it. All of > threw it away in disgust. Cool! > I am having doubts any pre-teen and only some teens are able to > run/configure any OS and them to be overwhelmed all over the place > without supervison/prior instructions. Once they have been instructed, > they likely are able work with it. Yeah, unfortunately this was an Inkscape and Gimp class, not an Operating Systems 101 class. We didn't cover the bootloader, the init system, the terminal, or anything like that. >> Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main >> target audience now? > > I hope not ... I am not interested in converting Fedora or Linux into a > toy. How many teens and pre-teens do you know who actually play with toys rather than computers, tablets, and smartphones? Seriously? Do you know any teens or pre-teens? ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 15:16, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit : > > Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot > sequence. (btw, in case it is not obvious, the solution described here is a form of dead-man switch, which is a proven method to handle operator failures. In the case of a computer, the operator is the system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch The basic principle behind a dead-man switch is that you go in safe mode unless you can prove the operator is alive, instead of using error detection to trigger safe mode. The first model is a lot more reliable than the second.) -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 02:23 PM, Ian Malone wrote: On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy wrote: On 03/13/2013 12:26 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: - (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to less-knowledgeable users." I'd call this to be an urban legend. A boot menu is self-explanatory, even to new-comers. It may baffle them when they see it for the first time, but will very soon get used to it. No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual computer users? 20 years+ of experience with Linux and more with other OSes :-) I have taught multiple classes of teenage and pre-teen students using Fedora Live USB keys. This necessarily involves having to guide them through using syslinux (which is very similar in appearance to grub) to boot their system, I can say from actual experience that: 1) The boot menu was not self-explanatory, and the students had a lot of questions about what stuff on the screen meant. And how did it impact their usage experience? I guess, their reaction was a "Wazat?", temporary "raising the eyebrow", but then they simply went on. Actually, I would expect your students to have more issues with understanding "keyboard layout" selection, "timezones" selection, explaining "hw-clock", the concepts behind "updates"/rpm-conflicts and so on and would consider the bootloader prompt to have been one (ignorable) detail amongst many other much huger problem. One experiment I did: I sat some relatives and friends (no computer iliterates) in front of Gnome3 and asked them to work with it. All of threw it away in disgust. Then you have good students. I am having doubts any pre-teen and only some teens are able to run/configure any OS and them to be overwhelmed all over the place without supervison/prior instructions. Once they have been instructed, they likely are able work with it. Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main target audience now? I hope not ... I am not interested in converting Fedora or Linux into a toy. Ralf -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> I know it is a simplification, but to me, the two sides of this > argument are: > > * remove the hood of the car, and keep it off in case something > goes wrong, or to entice new drivers to look in there and guess > what is going on. * keep the hood of the car on, and if something > goes wrong, pop it. If the driver wants to tweak, or have a look > around let them pull the lever and pop the hood. > > --ryanlerch I was pretty much unable to do anything when my hood release froze this winter. The only way to get under the hood and fix a problem with starting the car was to wait for warmer weather. Just a thought. Sebastian Mäki -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> From: Máirín Duffy > > Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with > other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather > than separating it out for access only in a completely different context? Because maybe your computer boots just fine but you're screens are all garbled or just black. Been there, done that. Yes, I could blame Nvidia for not giving me a FOSS driver, but: my work computer came with their hardware, I have a 4-headed display and I've never been able to get any FOSS config to support this as much as I would much prefer that. Personally, I would never think to go into a control panel, but that's just because I've got a gray beard and do things the "hard way" because that used to be the "only way". I'm not suggesting that new ways aren't possible or preferable, but we should preserve traditional methods if there's no or little harm in doing so. -- John Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 23:52 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Le Mar 12 mars 2013 19:04, Peter Jones a écrit : > > > Obviously we need to do a good job of making sure we tolerate failures, > > and there are multiple ways to do this - if you reboot N times within M > > seconds or somesuch might be a worthwhile heuristic. > > By definition an heuristic is unreliable. The current mechanism, while > not-pretty, is reliable. Reliability is the major property you want in any > rescue system. (that's why safety jackets use flashy unfashionable colors) Just for the record, (non/less) deterministic != (un)reliable. Take the following numbers with a grain of salt because I obviously pulled them out of a hat: If we have error detection that "only" catches say 95% of error conditions, why shouldn't we use it to make these cases bearable (for power users anyway), additionally to say 80% of normal boots "awesome" for everyone at the cost of making the remaining 1% a little less easy -- e.g. having to push a keycombo which you have to know at that point. Making this knowledge discoverable is something else and IMO has no place in the boot process (because it just confuses, annoys in 99% of cases). People who want to be power users will find this out, even if we fail to make that information easily discoverable. People who don't have these ambitions won't magically want to turn into power users because we advertise "here's where power users turn right" during every boot. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 13 March 2013 15:07, Vít Ondruch wrote: > Dne 13.3.2013 14:23, Ian Malone napsal(a): >> >> Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main target audience now? I'm really not >> sure what it is anymore. > > > Are you suggesting that we should exclude them? > Yes okay, that's what I'm suggesting. It's not at all a deliberate misinterpretation. Giving up on this thread altogether now. -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 09:23 AM, Ian Malone wrote: > Then you have good students. Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main > target audience now? I'm really not sure what it is anymore. Is there any good reason to exclude them? I started using Linux (Red Hat 5.1) as a 3rd year high school student. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Dne 13.3.2013 14:23, Ian Malone napsal(a): Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main target audience now? I'm really not sure what it is anymore. Are you suggesting that we should exclude them? Vít -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 10:57 AM, Nils Philippsen wrote: > I'm with you that users shouldn't see this by default, but rather e.g. > upon encountering an error condition (or if configured differently). > However, we still could use better wording for such a message, even if > we restrict ourselves to English, e.g.: "Press if you want to > change how your system starts." That's hardly in the league of Japanese > for someone not speaking it. Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather than separating it out for access only in a completely different context? I mean, I 100% agree if you can't boot, it should pop up automatically. But for cases where you've booted into the machine and just noticed your network doesn't work - we don't automatically notice if the network isn't working and reboot into the boot options screen, and I'm not sure if that would make any sense because there's more reasons the network might not be working besides a new broken kernel update. In that situation my first instinct would be to go into the control panel and poke around and see if there was something I could fix there, and maybe search online for an answer. My first instinct would not be to reboot the system and go into the bootloader menu - it's not intuitive that the problem happened because of a new kernel, and usually when I find myself in that situation it really does take me a while to think it might be a new kernel with a broken driver. I mean, it could be other things too - for example, my network card could be turned off in network manager (has happened before, when i turned off wireless after a plane trip). If I just wanted to explore my options with configuring the computer, I would also go to the control panel first to poke around - again I wouldn't think to reboot the system and poke around with the menus there, I really feel it's not intuitive to configure a particular system before the system is even loaded, if that makes sense? ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 15:48, Máirín Duffy a écrit : > On 03/13/2013 10:43 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: >> If you're lamenting the cryptical form of the current strings I totally >> agree with you but I don't think there is any technical limitation that >> prevents improving this text instead of dumping the baby with the bath >> water. > > I'm not. I'm making an analogy. The terminology / jargon on the > bootloader page (even the very term, 'bootloader') is about as useful as > Japanese to a non-Japanese speaker, so throwing it up in their face > 'just in case' isn't really as effective as some are posing it would be. I think I'll take that as a yes :) -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 10:48 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote: > On 03/13/2013 10:43 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > If you're lamenting the cryptical form of the current strings I totally > > agree with you but I don't think there is any technical limitation that > > prevents improving this text instead of dumping the baby with the bath > > water. > > I'm not. I'm making an analogy. The terminology / jargon on the > bootloader page (even the very term, 'bootloader') is about as useful as > Japanese to a non-Japanese speaker, so throwing it up in their face > 'just in case' isn't really as effective as some are posing it would be. I'm with you that users shouldn't see this by default, but rather e.g. upon encountering an error condition (or if configured differently). However, we still could use better wording for such a message, even if we restrict ourselves to English, e.g.: "Press if you want to change how your system starts." That's hardly in the league of Japanese for someone not speaking it. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 14:29 +0100, Nils Philippsen wrote: > I don't see a glaring error with this idea. What do you > think? Well, I talked to a few guys in the office about it and there's one interesting issue with part of my idea: trying to detect multi-boot environments means that the boot loader won't behave in a deterministic fashion, it'll try to adapt to my behavior and always lag behind. So I'd leave this part out and make it like that, i.e. much simpler: - Enable/adapt timeout if an error condition is detected (whether that happens through measuring the time between boots, or something else, or a combination needs to be evaluated). - Measure "time for successful reboot" as described in my original post to enable/adapt the timeout for long POSTs. Usually the reboot/POST times won't vary that much, so store this time somewhere and use it to make decisions during cold boots. If some hardware is added/removed which influences POST time drastically the first boot will be off w.r.t. timeout -- aw, shucks. People "in the know" can always configure the boot loader to do nothing fancy but a set, or no timeout, or override booting once through key strokes or whatever. Making this discoverable without cluttering up the boot process is left as an exercise to the reader, but I guess would belong somewhere into System Settings or equivalent, or the "Help System" should we ever grow one integrated thing instead of a number of competing approaches (man pages, info pages, N different desktop help systems). Oh well. Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 10:43 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > If you're lamenting the cryptical form of the current strings I totally > agree with you but I don't think there is any technical limitation that > prevents improving this text instead of dumping the baby with the bath > water. I'm not. I'm making an analogy. The terminology / jargon on the bootloader page (even the very term, 'bootloader') is about as useful as Japanese to a non-Japanese speaker, so throwing it up in their face 'just in case' isn't really as effective as some are posing it would be. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 15:26, Máirín Duffy a écrit : Máirín, > I would argue that throwing information up in people's faces 100% of the > time when it's useless to over 95% of those people is like throwing a > text in Japanese at a non-Japanese English speaker in the hopes that > somehow they would be able to read it and magically become fluent in > Japanese. I'm French. You don't need to preach the evilness of pervasive English intrusion in non-English-speaking countries to me:) Yet I will take some English boot text over no text at all any day. It is definitely evil but in that case it's the lesser one. If you're lamenting the cryptical form of the current strings I totally agree with you but I don't think there is any technical limitation that prevents improving this text instead of dumping the baby with the bath water. -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Am 13.03.2013 13:46, schrieb Máirín Duffy: > If the general principle of 'specialized technical crap confuses people > who don't understand it' is a mystical urban legend to you, you might > want to try teaching a class to less-experienced computer users or > watching usability test videos. Or maybe try volunteering at a community > technical helpdesk. Your opinion will change pretty quickly what the hell i installed my first linux a few months after i bought my first PC in the 1990's and in this years there was no mailing-list and no internet at all, there was very few of all the shiny things which makes a linux OS these days nearly idiot proof i wonder how i survived to learn all this stuff which is so confusing - why do linux need to handhold anybody which does get scared from a simple menu where each trained monkey in doubt seletcs the first entry? signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Hi, On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:29:34 +0100 Nils Philippsen wrote: > Otherwise, no or a short timeout is used. I'm sure finding the best > thresholds, length of the list etc. needs some experimenting, but > besides that I don't see a glaring error with this idea. What do you > think? I like it. Best regards, Jan Dvorak signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> From: "Nicolas Mailhot" > > Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot > sequence. > > 1. the bootloader screen is no longer themed with colour backgrounds but > is predominantly black and white. Boot is transitioning from a black shut > down screen so any colour or grey background is going to flash. (Microsoft > understood this fact years ago. They killed their old win9x colour > background boot image) > > 2. Bootloader entries are prefixed by a small paragraph of text that > explains they are safety options that should be used in case of problem. > If you can localize it so much the better but from a user POW an English > message is better than no message at all and silent failing. This is the > last screen the user will see before boot craps itself, so it needs to be > helpful not pretty. > > In case input has not been initialised yet it needs to at least provide a > pointer to a web page that explains how to rescue the system (letting > users google is not good. The only thing they will find is messages from > other users that had boot problems, which will reinforce their feeling > Fedora is not reliable). > > 3. if you want to cheer it up you can add a fire extinguisher icon or > something else that conveys safety measure to an i18n audience. > > 4. that is the only theming that should occur. No colour experiments, no > Fedora logo, no video mode switches, nothing to distract from the message > > 5. the default wait period is at least 5 seconds, maybe as much as 10. > > 6. any successful boot (where actual non automatic user activity occurs > after the boot, and software shutdown completes) temporarily overrides the > wait period and shortens it for the next boot to the minimal value that > lets the user react (2-3 s IIRC from the discussion). So a hardware reset > or battery pull restores the full default wait. As long as everything is > fine users get short boots. > > 7. any detected problem, or dangerous operation such as kernel update > resets the wait time till successful boot occurs again (see 6) > > 8. the wait periods are settable in kickstart so vm farm, embedded people, > and Lennart can set it to zero if they feel like it. At zero it will flash > too fast for users to notice (esp. if the screen is predominantly black). > > 9. after a few releases the wait period default values are reevaluated by > FESCO, based on the actual in-the-field observed reliability of the error > detection heuristics (ie build the new safety net before removing the old > one) > > Sincerely, > > -- > Nicolas Mailhot > > -- > devel mailing list > devel@lists.fedoraproject.org > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel If this could be made to work as described, I'd be happy with it. -- John Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 09:28 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > Le Mer 13 mars 2013 01:32, Máirín Duffy a écrit : >> On 03/12/2013 07:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: >>> I am saying this because I agree. To me the proposal (not the original >>> but some point in the the 500 ms boot time "ideal" ) seemed very much >>> a welded shut view. And as someone who has to worked on welded shut >>> computers for asthetic reasons.. it brings out the fighting urge in >>> me. >> >> Did you guys actually read the blog post? Is aesthetics cited in any of >> the reasons for hiding the menu? No, it's not. These were the reasons I >> cited in favor of the proposal to hide the menu: > > Máirín, > > That was uncalled for Um, what? > >> "- Changing video modes makes the screen flash unnecessarily. > > This is an aesthetics argument You could say that. You could also say that it's an annoyance and causes X issues (which it does), which you decided to separate out as if I listed it as a different issue rather than the *same* issue. >> The video mode changing also screws up how our X setup works >> and results in unnecessary bugs for users. > > Nobody here argued for mode changing. Showing the screen makes that happen, so if you're arguing for showing the screen by default you are arguing for mode changing. > >> - We used to suppress the boot menu by default in earlier releases and >> its suppression didn’t cause major problems. > > This suppression was IIRC incomplete which is why people let it pass. How was it incomplete? >> - There’s other ways for the user to indicate wanting to enter the menu >> besides boot-time keypresses – other OSes have methods to enter these >> menus by rebooting from a running system (systemd is working on this) > > This is besides the point, if you are in a running system that means that > the boot was successful. See below quoted snippet split out. The 'or' is pretty key grammatically. > >> or >> automatically loading the menu when an error condition is encountered. > > And they are not reliable. It is good enough for them because any hardware > that fails to boot under a commercial OS gets quickly RMA-ed. That is not > the case for Linux. Peter has already explained that the error detection mechanism here is very extensible. > >> - Not listening for keypresses doesn’t probe USB, meaning not waiting >> for keypresses will make boot even faster since we won’t have to >> load/probe USB. > > Most of the systems Fedora runs on use USB devices in one form or another > so this does not matter in real life. You'll need to probe anyway. We probe twice when we don't need to. > >> - (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared >> towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to >> less-knowledgeable users." > > It is not a power-user oriented screen unless you think normal other never > do updates and never get boot problems. UI is hard. Removing UI elements > that were added to solve user problems is not improving UI. It's the > ostrich approach to difficult decisions. I would argue that throwing information up in people's faces 100% of the time when it's useless to over 95% of those people is like throwing a text in Japanese at a non-Japanese English speaker in the hopes that somehow they would be able to read it and magically become fluent in Japanese. Yes, if you speak Japanese natively, it's quite easy for you and difficult for you to understand how anybody would struggle with it. You're a native speaker. Most people aren't. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> From: Simo Sorce > To: Development discussions related to Fedora > Date: 03/13/2013 09:47 > Subject: Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience > Sent by: devel-boun...@lists.fedoraproject.org > > On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 09:34 -0400, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > > > From: Chris Murphy > > > I'm sure there were a bunch of sorry whiners > > > missing verbose text boot scrolling by their screen by default, in > > > favor of graphical boot. > > > > Or perhaps those "whiners" consider themselves responsible employees > > by being diligent in understanding what "normal and correct" looks > > like so that they can recognize when something is going south and > > maybe doing something to avert a crisis before it occurs. > > And maybe they are wrong, we'll never know ... They being the employees or the error messages? With either answer, I'd prefer to explain to my boss that I spent time investigating something that was merely a false alarm than to explain why I cannot now salvage something that has gone horribly wrong and I didn't do anything about it because the UX to warn me was unpleasant. > > I swear that every time I read about how boot (or other) is so > > unaesthetic I really have to wonder if people are actually using their > > system as a tool to do work, or if they're merely playing with them as > > a novelty. Not that there's anything wrong such play, but please stop > > trying polish the appearance at the expense of functionality for those > > who see them only as tool. > > > So let me allow to make a parallel. > > You go working every day wearing work clothes like these [1] because you > see them only as a tool and you need to get work done ? > An obviously caring about appearance as well as functionality or as a > compromise is wrong, right ? I have nothing wrong with wanting to make a good appearance, but I will never put that before function. As an engineer, I see beauty in function and capability, not glitter. If function doesn't have to be compromised, yeah go to town with the appearance. As for those work clothes, it would depend on the job. If I was to do business presentations, no I wouldn't want to be caught dead dressed that way. However, if I was about to jump in a grease pit and do some seriously dirty work, those look mighty appealing to me. -- John Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 11:52:40PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > rescue system. (that's why safety jackets use flashy unfashionable colors) So we should make the boot loader use flashy unfashionable colors because it makes it more reliable? Ok that's silly, but it's also silly for safety jackets. --CJD -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot sequence. 1. the bootloader screen is no longer themed with colour backgrounds but is predominantly black and white. Boot is transitioning from a black shut down screen so any colour or grey background is going to flash. (Microsoft understood this fact years ago. They killed their old win9x colour background boot image) 2. Bootloader entries are prefixed by a small paragraph of text that explains they are safety options that should be used in case of problem. If you can localize it so much the better but from a user POW an English message is better than no message at all and silent failing. This is the last screen the user will see before boot craps itself, so it needs to be helpful not pretty. In case input has not been initialised yet it needs to at least provide a pointer to a web page that explains how to rescue the system (letting users google is not good. The only thing they will find is messages from other users that had boot problems, which will reinforce their feeling Fedora is not reliable). 3. if you want to cheer it up you can add a fire extinguisher icon or something else that conveys safety measure to an i18n audience. 4. that is the only theming that should occur. No colour experiments, no Fedora logo, no video mode switches, nothing to distract from the message 5. the default wait period is at least 5 seconds, maybe as much as 10. 6. any successful boot (where actual non automatic user activity occurs after the boot, and software shutdown completes) temporarily overrides the wait period and shortens it for the next boot to the minimal value that lets the user react (2-3 s IIRC from the discussion). So a hardware reset or battery pull restores the full default wait. As long as everything is fine users get short boots. 7. any detected problem, or dangerous operation such as kernel update resets the wait time till successful boot occurs again (see 6) 8. the wait periods are settable in kickstart so vm farm, embedded people, and Lennart can set it to zero if they feel like it. At zero it will flash too fast for users to notice (esp. if the screen is predominantly black). 9. after a few releases the wait period default values are reevaluated by FESCO, based on the actual in-the-field observed reliability of the error detection heuristics (ie build the new safety net before removing the old one) Sincerely, -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 09:34 -0400, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > > From: Chris Murphy > > I'm sure there were a bunch of sorry whiners > > missing verbose text boot scrolling by their screen by default, in > > favor of graphical boot. > > Or perhaps those "whiners" consider themselves responsible employees > by being diligent in understanding what "normal and correct" looks > like so that they can recognize when something is going south and > maybe doing something to avert a crisis before it occurs. And maybe they are wrong, we'll never know ... > I swear that every time I read about how boot (or other) is so > unaesthetic I really have to wonder if people are actually using their > system as a tool to do work, or if they're merely playing with them as > a novelty. Not that there's anything wrong such play, but please stop > trying polish the appearance at the expense of functionality for those > who see them only as tool. > So let me allow to make a parallel. You go working every day wearing work clothes like these [1] because you see them only as a tool and you need to get work done ? An obviously caring about appearance as well as functionality or as a compromise is wrong, right ? Simo. [1] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PWiGSr3ymuw/TpnXBp-z0VI/D34/mMosookklVY/s1600/workclothes-01.jpg -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> From: Chris Murphy > > On Mar 12, 2013, at 12:19 PM, john.flor...@dart.biz wrote: > > > > I personally could not care less about the defaults Fedora uses. > I've been overriding them for years. I'm just glad I was able to > learn these things before everything became hidden. > > Because, naturally, you don't explore, find, or learn anything > hidden. No, I do find it, but at considerable expense sometimes which only decreases the value I find in any such system, Fedora or otherwise. > > Today's youth have none of the curiosity that I and my friends > had at their age and I blame it on this "you don't need to know how > it works" mentality that is infecting everything. > > Oh that's original. Your parents and grandparents never, ever said > anything like this. They never said it to me. They encouraged my exploration despite situations where I maybe I should have been held back, but I learned and yes sometimes the very hard way. I see that way being replaced with fear, apprehension and avoidance; just be a consumer and stop trying to be a producer. From my POV, it's a sad progression, but hey that's just me and my screwed up perspective. > > If you really want that Apple experience, why don't you just use > their goods? > > I do. Curious, isn't it, how I managed to stumble into linux boot > loading, and file systems of all things, never having a single > chance of seeing such things? They weren't merely hidden from me. > They didn't even exist. Well good for you, but why make it harder than it needs to be? -- John Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
> From: Chris Murphy > I'm sure there were a bunch of sorry whiners > missing verbose text boot scrolling by their screen by default, in > favor of graphical boot. Or perhaps those "whiners" consider themselves responsible employees by being diligent in understanding what "normal and correct" looks like so that they can recognize when something is going south and maybe doing something to avert a crisis before it occurs. I swear that every time I read about how boot (or other) is so unaesthetic I really have to wonder if people are actually using their system as a tool to do work, or if they're merely playing with them as a novelty. Not that there's anything wrong such play, but please stop trying polish the appearance at the expense of functionality for those who see them only as tool. -- John Florian -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 15:47 +0100, Jan Dvořák wrote: > As have already been mentioned before, POSTing server takes so long > that GRUB delay is hardly noticeable. But what is worse, if you miss > the kernel selection dialog on a server, you look at UP TO FIVE MORE > MINUTES of waiting for the damn thing before you get another attempt. IMO that one's actually solvable to an extent (in theory at least and not always to a 100% correct but good enough): The boot loader (GRUB2, gummiboot, ..., I don't care) stores the booted OS (as in e.g. "Fedora $version", "Windows $version", ...) in a short list (of say 2 ~ 5 items) and the timestamp of booting somewhere it can read it. If being rebooted (as opposed to being shut down), the OS (systemd probably but I don't really care) writes the current HW clock timestamp very late in the reboot process somewhere else the boot loader can read it. A timeout is enabled or extended appropriately if: - the user rebooted into different OSs in the last 2 ~ 5 times because the user seems to want multi-booting, or if - the time of previous boot is not long enough in the past because there might be a problem with the boot attempt (give the user a chance to boot something else, mess with the boot parameters, ...), or if - the "time of shutdown before reboot" is older than a certain threshold, because this indicates a BIOS with a very long POST (to help users not miss the opportunity to influence what is booted and how) Otherwise, no or a short timeout is used. I'm sure finding the best thresholds, length of the list etc. needs some experimenting, but besides that I don't see a glaring error with this idea. What do you think? Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty n...@redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
Le Mer 13 mars 2013 01:32, Máirín Duffy a écrit : > On 03/12/2013 07:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: >> I am saying this because I agree. To me the proposal (not the original >> but some point in the the 500 ms boot time "ideal" ) seemed very much >> a welded shut view. And as someone who has to worked on welded shut >> computers for asthetic reasons.. it brings out the fighting urge in >> me. > > Did you guys actually read the blog post? Is aesthetics cited in any of > the reasons for hiding the menu? No, it's not. These were the reasons I > cited in favor of the proposal to hide the menu: Máirín, That was uncalled for > "- Changing video modes makes the screen flash unnecessarily. This is an aesthetics argument > The video mode changing also screws up how our X setup works > and results in unnecessary bugs for users. Nobody here argued for mode changing. > - We used to suppress the boot menu by default in earlier releases and > its suppression didn’t cause major problems. This suppression was IIRC incomplete which is why people let it pass. > - There’s other ways for the user to indicate wanting to enter the menu > besides boot-time keypresses – other OSes have methods to enter these > menus by rebooting from a running system (systemd is working on this) This is besides the point, if you are in a running system that means that the boot was successful. > or > automatically loading the menu when an error condition is encountered. And they are not reliable. It is good enough for them because any hardware that fails to boot under a commercial OS gets quickly RMA-ed. That is not the case for Linux. > - Not listening for keypresses doesn’t probe USB, meaning not waiting > for keypresses will make boot even faster since we won’t have to > load/probe USB. Most of the systems Fedora runs on use USB devices in one form or another so this does not matter in real life. You'll need to probe anyway. > - (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared > towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to > less-knowledgeable users." It is not a power-user oriented screen unless you think normal other never do updates and never get boot problems. UI is hard. Removing UI elements that were added to solve user problems is not improving UI. It's the ostrich approach to difficult decisions. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy wrote: > On 03/13/2013 12:26 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: >>> - (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared >>> towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to >>> less-knowledgeable users." >> I'd call this to be an urban legend. A boot menu is self-explanatory, >> even to new-comers. >> >> It may baffle them when they see it for the first time, but will very >> soon get used to it. > > No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban > legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban > legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual > computer users? That's like calling Fitts' Law an 'old wives' tale!' > > I have taught multiple classes of teenage and pre-teen students using > Fedora Live USB keys. This necessarily involves having to guide them > through using syslinux (which is very similar in appearance to grub) to > boot their system, I can say from actual experience that: > > 1) The boot menu was not self-explanatory, and the students had a lot of > questions about what stuff on the screen meant. > Then you have good students. Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main target audience now? I'm really not sure what it is anymore. -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed 13 Mar 2013 08:53:32 AM EDT, Reindl Harald wrote: > i wonder how i survived to learn all this stuff which > is so confusing - why do linux need to handhold anybody > which does get scared from a simple menu where each trained > monkey in doubt seletcs the first entry? Clearly you're a genius, Reindl. But I could already tell that from your other posts to this thread. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 12:47 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > I read the blog and I was NOT talking about your blog post. Rereading > what I wrote does show that I did not convey that clearly. What I was > trying to refer to was that over the long winding thread others have > pointed out that this would be great from an aesthetics view or > implying that wanting to see the boot messages was uglifying things. > > That was where my dander was getting up earlier. Your blog post did > not get up my dander and I was agreeing that you were a) listening to > us old grognards and b) trying to come up with a solution that > encompassed that listening. I don't think it's worth getting upset over the aesthetics point because it clearly appears to be a minor one and not the main impetus. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 03/13/2013 12:26 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote: >> - (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared >> towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to >> less-knowledgeable users." > I'd call this to be an urban legend. A boot menu is self-explanatory, > even to new-comers. > > It may baffle them when they see it for the first time, but will very > soon get used to it. No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual computer users? That's like calling Fitts' Law an 'old wives' tale!' I have taught multiple classes of teenage and pre-teen students using Fedora Live USB keys. This necessarily involves having to guide them through using syslinux (which is very similar in appearance to grub) to boot their system, I can say from actual experience that: 1) The boot menu was not self-explanatory, and the students had a lot of questions about what stuff on the screen meant. 2) After the students got used to it, it really annoyed them because it delayed their bootup and they had to hit enter to get through it. 3) Occasionally they would see the screen, panic, forget the correct menu entry to select (the first one) and would have to ask for help even a few weeks into the program. I do hope they were able to continue to use the keys after the classes were over and they were allowed to take them home, but if they got confused I don't even know if asking their parents would have helped. If the general principle of 'specialized technical crap confuses people who don't understand it' is a mystical urban legend to you, you might want to try teaching a class to less-experienced computer users or watching usability test videos. Or maybe try volunteering at a community technical helpdesk. Your opinion will change pretty quickly. ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 10:16 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote: > > Am 13.03.2013 02:54, schrieb Simo Sorce: > > On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 23:23 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote: > >> > >> Am 12.03.2013 23:13, schrieb Simo Sorce: > >>> On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 22:37 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote: > > Am 12.03.2013 22:34, schrieb Simo Sorce: > > I reboot VMs a lot for development, 2 seconds do make a difference > > Bruhahaha > > 100 reboots = 200 seconds = 3.3 Minutes more for 100 reboots > well, i boot probably more VMs you have ever seen BUT if two > seconds are really counting you are doing something terrible > wrong and should take a deep breat and a coffee > >>> > >>> Wehn you spin 100 Vms at the same time and do not care when they come > >>> up you are not in teh same situationa s someone doing development and > >>> waiting doing nothing on the particular VM he is testing > >> > >> who speaks of spin up 100 VMs at the same time? > >> > >> i am doing also development and reboot test-VMs often > >> but if you believe 2 seconds boot-time make and difference > >> you are doing all wrong - some people hammering permanently > >> on their machines and get hurted by two seconds, others are > >> thinking before the are doing technical stuff, you can guess > >> which are having more success at the end of the day > > > > Yeah I must be a useless idiot > > your words > > SO DISABLE THE GRUB-DELAY ON YOU FUCKING MACHINE > BUT LEAVE THE DEFAULTS IN PEACE - IS THIS SO > DIFFICULT AND IF IT IS HOW DIFFICULT WOULD IT > BE FOR THE BEGINNER TO GET THE OTHER TURN? Dear Reindl, it is evident even to a beginner that it is clearly more difficult for a beginner to change a system setting than for an experienced admin. You know that, so you already know the answer to your question. Shouting and swearing will not improve your message in any way. Your faithful idiot, Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On 12 March 2013 22:13, Simo Sorce wrote: > Why should the default configuration be ugly, slow, and biased toward > handling the odd case when things break ? > I confess I've only been lightly skimming this entire deeply interesting thread, on which more man hours have almost certainly now been spent than will ever be taken by a boot delay in grub, however I did get the impression that 'ugly' is actually a series of fixable bugs and not the inevitable result of making it apparent to a user that the boot sequence can be interrupted and changed if the machine is in trouble. Further, aside from the 'broken' boot problem (and lots of people on this devel list will have much easier access to multiple computers to look things up in that case than the average user), there is also the case where people are asked to change boot parameters to help try and debug problems that do not directly result in the machine not booting. Now in that case you can tell them how to do it, but why not make it simple rather than requiring hair trigger reflexes to catch the right key at the right moment (and again, that's harder for someone who is not used to messing about with booting and the timings and sequences involved). -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed Mar 13 00:32:09 UTC 2013 Máirín Duffy wrote: "Displaying information geared towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to less-knowledgeable users." Surely if our target audience / user base is those who have a capability / interest in contributing then we shouldn't be looking to dumb the boot experience down - that would probably be a reasonable choice for Mint or Ubuntu but I fail to see why it's a good one for Fedora. Alan -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Improving the Fedora boot experience
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:10 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > Le Mar 12 mars 2013 21:53, Máirín Duffy a écrit : >> I tried breaking this thread down into its components and summarizing >> the discussion and points brought up thus far. I hope it helps: >> >> http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2013/03/12/improving-the-fedora-boot-experience/ > > Máirín, > > The proposal discussed here is not to "keep the hood on the car". > The proposal is to remove any indication there is a hood, and show the > user a seamless surface with no hint it can be opened (or how). > > No one there objects to pretty hoods. They object to fixing the hood > appearance by removing any indication of a hood. > > Good car design is not removing the emergency tail lights button because > it "ruins" the panel appearance. Good car design is to keep the emergency > tail lights button, and make it pretty. Even if regulations demand it is > bright red when the designer wanted a smooth black panel. You are making too much fuzz about "emergency" and "maintenance"... we tried this once and the world didn't fall over. The only reason why we don't have it now is the move to grub2. If you know 1) what a kernel is 2) that booting a different kernel might fix your boot issue then you should be able to open the boot menu. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
