Re: boot menu

On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 11:45:45AM -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> >At 3:12 PM +0100 11/30/04, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> >
> >>Zitat von Garance A Drosihn <drosih_at_rpi.edu>:
> >>
> >>> Another thought came to me last night.  We could leave the startup
> >>> as it is (without a menu), but if someone hits the space bar we
> >>> could print out a single line which says "Type 'menu' to see a
> >>> menu of common boot options".  That menu would not need any
> >>> countdown timer on it, because it would only come up when someone
> >>> had asked for it.  And screen-clearing should not be a problem,
> >>> since the menu only pops up after someone asks for it.
> >>
> >>
> >>This doesn't work. The intend is to make it easy for newbies (and
> >>tuneable for others). How do newbies know they have to press a key
> >>to be able to circumvent their problems (e.g. disabling ACPI)?
> >
> >
> >Because the standard one-line prompt tells them to.  "press any
> >key but ENTER to see what boot options you have", or something
> >like that.  It's just a matter of picking the right line or two.
> >
> >I personally wouldn't mind having the menu there by default, but
> >some people have mentioned an issue with the clear-screen in it,
> >or that a larger menu slows down booting on a serial console.
> >I'm just trying to suggest ideas which should avoid those issues,
> >but will still provide a menu for the novice/casual FreeBSD user.
> >
> >But at this point I think I've made enough suggestions, so I'm
> >waiting to see what others think we should do.
> >
> 
> So I gave 4 options in another email, but haven't seen any real response
> to those yet.  For a refresher:
> 
> 1) 'Classic'.  Just as it is in 5-STABLE
> 2) 'Enhanced'. Compound menus, switchable logo or no logo, [Space] 
> re-assigned to Exit.  On-line help.  Maybe even smart enough to
> save its own configuration settings.
> 3) 'Minimal'.  No frames, logos, timers, etc.  Just the menu options.
> Possibly auto-selected if it detects that its on the comconsole.  Not
> sure how this would work for sparc64 and alpha, though.
> 4) 'None'. No menu at all.
> 
> The plan would be to have these 4 options be selectable in 6-CURRENT.
> The default would be 'Enhanced'.

This sounds ideal.

I'd prefer to be pretty agressive about falling back to minimal so if
we aren't 100% sure we're on a display with well known characteristics
(like the BIOS console) we fall back.  Specificaly, I'd prefer that all
remote consoles including dcons avoid anything more complicated then
scrolling.  IMO sparc64 should always do minimal.  The basic emulated
text console is so incrediably crappy as to be useless for anything else
(which is probably why the basic interactive commands in Solaris have
such simple looking interfaces).

-- Brooks

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