On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 04:05:57AM -0500, Kamil Paral wrote:
----- "Scott Robbins" <scottro(a)nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> I'm wondering if it's worth considering increasing grub's default
> timeout to 3 seconds or so. As it stands, one has to hover over the
> escape key, trying to time it correctly. (Or, if they're as lazy as
> I
> am, before rebooting, go to another terminal and edit the mounted
> grub.config.)
Hello,
I would not try to cure the symptoms but the cause of the problem.
The problem is not "the timeout is short enough", but it is "it's
hard to get into grub boot screen". For example in the Windows world,
the bootloader doesn't show any items and doesn't wait, but *everyone
knows* that you just press F8 again and again on computer start if
you want to get into the rescue mode. Even my "common users" friends
know that (which also says something about product quality ;)).
I have just googled a little and I have found out, that it should be
sufficient to hold Shift while starting up (really hold, no pressing
needed) and the boot screen shows. This is great. It should work mainly
for Grub 2, but from my attempts also Grub (1) available in Fedora 12
responds to Shift holding.
I would like to try that on an VMware ESX installation. Unfortunately,
the only ones I have are production servers, though not mission
critical--still, I suspect my developers might be annoyed. :) Hrrm, I
*might* be able to talk them into it though, as they too, can be
affected by it.
The shift key would solve the issue, however, when one is at a local
server. I wish I'd known that, and I thank you for the information.
Does this solve your problem, or have I understood it incorrectly?
This would solve it, if it works on VMs where the console is slow to
react to key presses, such as a heavily loaded ESX server. Also, as you
wrote, and I so rudely snipped, making sure that the users are aware of
it would be the other factor.
Regardless, that's a useful bit of information that I never knew. Have
to try it later.
--
Scott Robbins
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