Always starts ro (read-only)

[komputes]

Why does friendly-recovery assume I am running it at boot time in ro? I don't understand what prompted this change. In the rare occasion that systems need to be mounted ro, shouldn't that be done as a kernel boot parameter?

Running /lib/friendly-recovery/recovery-menu from gnome-terminal, I still have to do remount. It doesn't detect that the root filesystem is already mounted.

From what I understand ro is mounted so that fsck can check the disk without modifying it. AFAIK fsck should run automatically in ro if dirty filesystems were detected and issues are not correctable (or if it had passed a number of boots without a check, then preform a check) so why is this being done every time?

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.18
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.19-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Oct 5 17:33:22 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Alpha i386 (20110817)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-04 (0 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

The switch to read/only by default was indeed done on purpose in Ubuntu 11.10 as we believe the default behaviour of the recovery mode should be to not make anything worse, which is achieved by having / and any other persistent filesystem read-only.

Friendly-recovery is designed to solely be started from the grub option, starting it manually from an already booted system isn't a supported use case.

In 12.04, the menu will be slightly updated to better reflect what's available in read-only mode and what's available in read/write mode, automatically switching to read/write when the user first selects one of these options.

[komputes (komputes)]

Thank you for taking in consideration the usability concern for the recovery menu in 12.04. I suggest that something along the lines of "Access Recovery Menu" be the verbose explanation for the remount/rw action. I know we're working with limited space here so we may need to get creative.

Do you know what specific usability changes are proposed for 12.04?

Feel free to re-open this bug if you would like to track this as a usability bug and not a request to boot directly into the recovery menu.