[Bug 1756659] [NEW] Installation problem: Difficult to enter boot option

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Just a feedback from testing a 18.04 daily build image.

I'm using the HP Microservers for years, they work pretty well with
Ubuntu, except for a particular detail: The graphics of all generations
of machines does not work out of the box with Ubuntu, it completely
blocks and the X server hangs and even the console has trouble.

Easy fix: the kernel options need  nosplash nomodeset   and everything
is fine. Pretty simple.


So usually it is easy to give that as additional parameters in grub when booting for the first time or log in over ssh and just add it to /etc/default/grub, to make things run. Usually not a problem since Microservers are usually used headless, i.e. without X11. 

Now I installed a daily desktop build version of 18.04 (server edition
not yet available) on a recent Gen10 machine, installation process
smooth an without any problems, but then could not login after
rebooting. I got the login mask from gdm, but after entering the
password, the desktop froze, no way to login over console or network.

Problem: It took me six unhealthy reboot attempts (each time with brute
force reset of the machine by turning the power off, since no way to
cleanly shut down or reboot the machine) to finally get into the grub
menu and to enter these options, because grub is invisible at the
default installation and so fast, that it is difficult to get the
required key pressed at the small window in time where it's possible.
After booting with nosplash nomodeset the machine was working normally
and putting it into /etc/default/grub  solved the problem (once I
managed to get into the machine).

However, having to kill the machine the hard way several times just to
get into the grub menu is not really clean and healthy. And IMHO an
unexperienced user would not be able to get this running and cleanly
installed. Which somehow contradicts the desktop edition's installation
process designed to keep things easy and suitable for non-experts.

** Affects: grub2 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Wishlist
         Status: Triaged


** Tags: bot-comment
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Installation problem: Difficult to enter boot option
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1756659
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