Installation report

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 12:08:45PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 12:33:09PM +0100, Sean Gibbins wrote:
> > Simple stuff if you are familiar with Grub - it'd worry the hell out of a
> > newbie dual booting for the first time though.  That 3 second timeout is
> > short enough for them to miss the message and wonder just where their
> > other OS has gone. Poor design choice IMHO: by all means default to
> > Ubuntu, but display the menu with a 5 or 10 second timeout would be my
> > suggestion.
> 
> That would be an extremely poor default for systems with only Ubuntu
> installed: those 10 seconds on every boot are wasted, and they add up.  As I
> mentioned, we do not yet have the infrastructure to change that default
> based on whether other operating systems are present, but since we have
> other uses for it as well, Colin is planning to implement it.

Note that this is quite different from the other operating system probe
we were talking about. In principle it's much easier: we're talking
about pre-first-reboot stuff here, where all the infrastructure is
already there. However, update-grub unhelpfully hardcodes the timeout.

Perhaps grub-installer could just sed the menu.lst generated by
update-grub, or something hackish like that.

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]