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Improving the Fedora Boot Experience

Posted by timothy on from the sir-the-cats-have-three-non-overlapping-ideas dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a recent post on Red Hat senior interaction designer Máirín Duffy's blog with an illuminating look at Red Hat's design process, and how things like graphic elements, widget behavior, and bootup time are taken into account. It starts: "So I have this thing on my desk at Red Hat that basically defines a simple design process. (Yes, it also uses the word 'ideate' and yes, it sounds funny but it is a real word apparently!) While the mailing list thread on the topic at this point is high-volume and a bit chaotic, there is a lot of useful information and suggestions in there that I think could be pulled into a design process and sorted out. So I took 3 hours (yes, 3 hours) this morning to wade through the thread and attempt to do this."

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Don't scare regular users of GNU/Linux. by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 3, Insightful
    re: There is nothing more scary to a non techie than the boot/kernel puking garbage on the screen.
    .
    You are exactly right. The original Mac OSX boot-up experience is a nice clean boot up screen with a few simple small icons flying by. The original Mac OS7 OS8 and OS9 bootups have a happy mac icon centered on the screen and the small icons for the addons on the bottom of the screen.
    .
    Linux boot-ups should have a simple graphical or text based boot up that says just a very few simple things: booting up
    checking drives
    starting network
    starting graphics
    tada!

    and allow for the user to hit one of the function keys or a space bar or something to allow for viewing of the detailed boot-up log. Most people don't really need to see all of the details and would certainly be scared by all of the words and labels that they might not understand. This is one area where OSX actually does a better job.

  2. Re:Why? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You can adjust that check frequency setting, 180 days is merely the default. But unless you can schedule to take the file-systems off-line, or put them in read-only mode and run an appropriate "fsck" on them before re-establishing write permission, this is actually a very good idea. There's nothing like the beginning of a disk problem being missed, or a file system corruption tied to a particular bad kernel, to leave a critical system in an unrecoverable state.

    For whatever group I work with, whether my own colleages or a business partner, I do try to schedule a reboot of *everything*, and a reboot at least once a year, to make sure that backups are done and tested and all the hardware will reboot successfully when the experts are _not_ available. You might be _amazed_ at the numer of servers described as "it just works" which failed on reboot, and failover systems and redundant connections that were _not_ failing over properly and were _not_ redundant.

  3. Re:Why? by davydagger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    long uptimes...

    I saw this argument in another thread. If you have a modern machine with long uptimes, it means your probably not up ot the latest patch.

    I generally reboot my server only when systemd(init), or the kernel is upgraded

    Thats about once every two weeks to a month TOPS. I wouldn't brag about having an unpatched machine.