fsck on boot is major usability issue

[Jonathan Musther]

If it was moved to shutdown, I would assume that the user would be able to
skip it, or better yet they would be prompted.

I have been contacted by autofsck users who have turned off a laptop and
then closed the lid immediately (or turned off a desktop and immediately
switched off the monitor) and not noticed the autofsck dialogue, one user's
laptop remained powered on until the battery was flat.  In that particular
case it was in his laptop bag on a bus journey, not the best place to have a
powered up hard drive.  The latest version now contains a timeout, if no
selection is made within 2 minutes, the machine will shut down without
running the check.  There's also an audio prompt to try to combat this.

The way I see it, if somebody turns on a computer, it doesn't matter whether
they absolutely need it right now, say for a presentation, but they
certainly want to use it now.  When most people shut down, they don't care
as they're no longer using it, with the addition of an autofsck style
prompt, they can postpone it if they need to.

Every time a new feature in a new version of Ubuntu means faster boot times,
this is publicised as a great thing, I find it odd that at the same time we
allow one in every 30 boots to be very, very long (with modern sized disks).



On Dec 22, 2007 2:20 AM, Aurélien Naldi <aurelien.naldi at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On ven, 2007-12-21 at 08:13 -0500, Evan wrote:
> > My personal preference would be to move it to shut-down, but an
> > interruptable check on boot is better than nothing. Just my two cents.
>
> I'm not sure that moving it to shutdown is a proper solution. Think
> about a laptop shuting down because its battery is nearly empty: how
> good is it to slow down the shutdown and risk a brutal power off ?
> Also, I'm often waiting for my computer to shutdown before leaving, I
> don't want to be late because of a fsck.
>
> Making it interruptible and runnable on demande easily is more
> important, then it can be on bootup or shutdown, I don't care ;)
>
> Regards.
> --
> Aurelien Naldi
>
>
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