Please enable grub hidden timeout by default

[Hadmut Danisch]

Just a feedback from testing a 18.04 daily build image.

I'm using the HP Microservers for years, they work pretty well with Ubuntu, except for a particular detail: The graphics of all generations of machines does not work out of the box with Ubuntu, it completely blocks and the X server hangs and even the console has trouble.

Easy fix: the kernel options need nosplash nomodeset and everything is fine. Pretty simple.

So usually it is easy to give that as additional parameters in grub when booting for the first time or log in over ssh and just add it to /etc/default/grub, to make things run. Usually not a problem since Microservers are usually used headless, i.e. without X11.

Now I installed a daily desktop build version of 18.04 (server edition not yet available) on a recent Gen10 machine, installation process smooth an without any problems, but then could not login after rebooting. I got the login mask from gdm, but after entering the password, the desktop froze, no way to login over console or network.

Problem: It took me six unhealthy reboot attempts (each time with brute force reset of the machine by turning the power off, since no way to cleanly shut down or reboot the machine) to finally get into the grub menu and to enter these options, because grub is invisible at the default installation and so fast, that it is difficult to get the required key pressed at the small window in time where it's possible. After booting with nosplash nomodeset the machine was working normally and putting it into /etc/default/grub solved the problem (once I managed to get into the machine).

However, having to kill the machine the hard way several times just to get into the grub menu is not really clean and healthy. And IMHO an unexperienced user would not be able to get this running and cleanly installed. Which somehow contradicts the desktop edition's installation process designed to keep things easy and suitable for non-experts.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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