grub should "silently succeed"

[Andrea Garbarini]

i know there are more important matters at hand regarding this package, but as the unix way dictates, grub should not notify the user about operations which were succesfully performed, this has been discussed at the ubuntu forums and got a good share of feedback from the community:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=519081

providing a patch should be trivial, I can do it myself, regards, andre

[Wagner Volanin (volanin)]

I agree with the submitter.

The display of text before usplash reminds me of Win95/98 times.
It's just an opinion, but every major OS has moved towards this
trend of removing boot messages if everything is OK, and thus
making the boot process look a lot more polished.

GRUB should be made completely silent, unless errors occur.
The user could still access the menu by holding ESC key.
Also, the kernel loading messages should be removed.

Error messages, on the contrary, should still be displayed in case
something goes wrong, so he user can promptly be informed,
and look for and apropriate solution, or file a bug report.

[nanog (sorenimpey)]

I also agree. The text messages make the distro look amatuerish. This is not what a newbie user should see when installing linux for the first time.

[Wagner Volanin (volanin)]

I am attaching a patch for this bug.
This patch disables GRUB notifications, making it silently suceeed.
Error messages are still displayed normally.

[Andrea Garbarini (garba)]

thanks for the patch volanin, i tried adding it to the patch list in the grub source package but i fear it didn't get succesfully applied, chances are this patch was built against the vanilla source tree

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

The Ubuntu grub has a "quiet" option that should keep it silent. What exactly are the messages that you see in Ubuntu 7.10?

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Aha, I think a saw these messages now, they fly by pretty fast: "Loading stage...." before the grub menu comes up. I guess if you don't have the menu displayed like me, you'll actually have those messages displayed for a while.

They are pretty nice to have for diagnosis if something goes wrong though.

See also https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/quieten-grub

[Andrea Garbarini (garba)]

indeed those are good for troubleshooting should something go wrong, but when things don't I don't want to be notified about them being ok ;) really, i'm starting to hate all those "grub loading stage xxx"

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 11:27:41PM -0000, Andrea Garbarini wrote:
> indeed those are good for troubleshooting should something go wrong, but
> when things don't I don't want to be notified about them being ok ;)
> really, i'm starting to hate all those "grub loading stage xxx"

Note that, because this is bootloader code, by the time something has gone
wrong it's often too late to print any more messages.

I'm not arguing that this should outweigh the desire for cleanliness, just
pointing out that to some degree there is a choice that has to be made here
- you can't have grub be completely silent during normal boot *and* get all
the debugging info out of it that you might need.

[gray (info-graydesigns)]

Hello

I far prefer **not** having that short, rather scruffy font telling me that grub is loading - I have tried out several other distros and thus far only debian and the ubuntu-based distros do this - it just looks amateurish. Possibly there might be an option in grub where one could turn that off ? Surely by now grub is sufficiently stable and reliable to not need it?

Gray

[Andrea Garbarini (garba)]

whatever, it looks like I am fighting a losing battle here, I wonder why not suppress the splash screen altogether and have the kernel spit out as many debugging messages as possible, that might come in handy should something go wrong, same logic applies, "silently succeed" doesn't seem to make any sense around here ^^ regards, andrea

[starko (starko-chello)]

You are not alone. There are plenty of people all over the net struggling to get GRUB fixed the way you describe. The troubleshooting apologists don't get it that functionality does not have to suffer. Steve, if it does not boot once there is always the next boot. Press a button (F1 or whatever is chosen) and voila - Normal people are happy and troubleshooters are fed.

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

In Karmic, Grub will not be visible (unless the user holds Shift during bootloader initialisations, which will trigger boot menu)

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

This is fixed in Karmic

[Andrea Garbarini (garba)]

actually, things look even worse on karmic, grub2 first prints a sort of text-based splash screen -> clearscreen -> info about the kernel image getting booted -> clear screen -> the "loading please wait" message is displayed (this last message is spawned from some script built in the initrd though but it should be suppresed)

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This is fixed in recent releases using grub version 2.