Feature request: "Restart to ..." option

No one neme6.vm at gmail.com
Mon Nov 2 17:55:08 UTC 2015


Well, it is not that uncommon for a "normal" user to have a Windows + Linux
installation. But maybe you are right, who knows. Another way of doing it
would be to hide the "Restart to" submenu in case there were no other OSs
apart from the current one (neither memtest nor advanced boot options would
be shown).
On Nov 2, 2015 13:29, "Luis Mondesi" <lemsx1 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20151102/691baf0d/attachment.html>


More information about the Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list