Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 09:53:02AM +1100, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Craig Sanders writes:
I believe I see a change in a recent update of a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machine. I do not see the GRUB selection screen anymore.
ubuntu's grub configuration is fucked up. it was bad enough in previous releases, and it has only got worse in Precise and Quantal.
Worse than needing to hit shift at exactly the right second, after waiting five minutes for the HP/IBM/SuperMicro BIOS to POST?
yeah, the recordfail anti-feature. the default value of -1 makes grub wait for user input on every reboot after any boot failure. not a huge problem on a desktop machine, but a PITA on a remote server or a VM.
in precise, recordfail=-1 is hard-coded. in quantal (and precise-updates, IIRC) they at least provided an override variable.
I think you're talking about something else. I'm talking about when they change hardy's one-second timeout, to a zero-second timeout. It looks to see if you're holding down shift or alt, and if you are, it pops up the GRUB prompt. Otherwise, it just boots the default option. Except, of course, you can't just hold shift down, because the key down event will be eaten by the BIOS before grub loads. (Hence why extlinux, when set to hide the prompt, accepts locks as well as mods.)