Hi there,
[A first short intro is mandatory, so people do not assume I´m a total
newbie: from the early 1990s to the late 90s I was an IBM OS/2 zealot.
With Linux, I started back in ´99/2000 with Caldera OpenLinux, before it
was engulfed by SCO. Then I had a brief love affair with SuSE 8.x / 9.0,
then I got attracted by LindowsOS, then disilussioned with KDE, jumped
ship to Sun JDS Linux. When Sun dropped its linux distro I got really
mad and jumped to Blag, a Fedora derivative, at the time based on FC6.]
That gets me to today when I have settled on Fedora 10 / 11.
QUESTION: what stops Fedora / RedHat from "giving the boot" to GRUB?.
I mean... I´ve run into GRUB annoyances several times over the years. In
private, most people whom I speak to hate it. It could be more user
friendly, but isn´t. In the case of a system which dual-boots Linux and
Windows, if you erase the Linux partition (say, to install a new Linux
version or resize partitions), you lose the ability to use Grub to load
Windows! -because it can no longer find the kernel and panics-
hillarious for a boot manager to depend on a given OS files).
Also, I think two common operations which were quite simple in OS/2 are
user-hostile in Linux, and that could be improved with a little boot
menu option. Those are: 1) reset graphics adapter to VGA mode
(640x480x16/256) or Vesa framebuffer drivers, and 2) boot to a command
line as root (yes, I know about editing the boot line in GRUB and typing
"single" at the end for single user mode.
I think Linux could use some inspiration to the way IBM OS/2 did things.
Basically upon boot, you had a few seconds (4-5 seconds after boot
started) to press Ctrl-Alt-F1, if you did, a menu would come up, of
which the two main options were:
1. Boot to command line
2. Reset video mode to VGA (so you could later fiddle with drivers, but
from a functional GUI).
Any hope of ever getting this kind of functionality in Linux used by
mainstream distro?.
Thoughts? Comments? Expletives? <VBG>
FC
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