Feature request: "Restart to ..." option

[Luis Mondesi]

> On Nov 2, 2015, at 07:09, No one <neme6.vm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think this feature would come in handy for those of us who have several OSs installed. Sometimes, you want to reboot your PC, go check something elsewhere (smartphone, bathroom...), and come back to the login screen. This is OK if you want to boot whatever GRUB has set as the default option. But if you want another one, then you have to stay in front of the PC so when GRUB comes up you can select it before the countdown comes to 0. This gets tiresome if you have to keep changing between different Linuxes.
> 
> This feature would parse the entries in /boot/grub/grub.cfg, and list them in a menu called "Restart to...", next to Shutdown, Restart, Suspend, etc. So you could for example choose "Restart to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS" or whatever. After rebooting, the GRUB menu would be skipped and the chosen option would be loaded directly. This could be done writing a file in /boot/grub, with a number or something. GRUB checks if this file exists and boots the given option, and if not, the menu is shown as usual.

I wrote a script called "boot-to" that does essentially this for other users with ability to restart a machine (mostly over ssh). 
The script does exactly what you say:
- grep title from grub menu
- counts places, and 
- uses grub's "once" feature

The user gets a menu to type a number starting at 0, and on next reboot it will go temporarily to that OS or kernel. If they reboot again it goes back to whatever the "save default" was last saved to. 

Maybe this would be a bit confusing to normal desktop users but for power users or super users that makes sense. So instead, I think this might be like the "Startup disk" control panel in the old Mac. That way you can go to the control panel if you need to boot to something else, but in general most users won't see confusing options in the standard/common way to reboot/shutdown.

Just my 2 cents ...

--
Luis