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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
