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Improving the Fedora Boot Experience
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."
The start up graphics is pointless, it is not interesting, nor does it tell you anything useful, and it just makes the boot process seem very slow.
One of the first things I do with a new fedora system is to disable the start up graphics, and display the boot up messages. So the boot process appears faster (may take exactly the same wall clock time, never measured it), and there is something at least vaguely interesting to look at. Plus, if it freezes for some reason, I've got some hint as to where the problem occurred.
Sure buddy; sounds like you're running XP. Fedora has well documented average time between kernel panics of 3.4 days.
I don't get all the hype about uptime.
My multi-media server easily gets five nines of uptime.
In fact, over 2012 it was way better than 9.9999% !
Yep, that's why I ditched UEFI. Flashed my /boot/ right into the BIOS with Coreboot. Just as secure as UEFI if I want it to be, and the system literally boots instantly.
If 1 disk = 1 partition, then it would be possible. But if your 6 disks contain more than one partition, you will find out that your time savings per disks will be minimum, none or even negative.
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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.
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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.
Booting Fedora is an "experience"? Who knew?
Naw, that's not an experience. An experience is being high on some sticky purple bud and driving a Lamborghini Gallardo on the Pacific Coast Highway with CHP on your tail and $7.5million in stolen money in a backpack on the seat next to you and busting through a guard rail, getting thrown 70 feet from the car and watching the Gallardo burst into a fireball while you realize you were only scratched and you somehow grabbed the backpack when you were thrown from the car. And now the police and the guys you stole the money from and your wife all think you're dead.
Now THAT'S an experience. Booting Fedora is not an experience.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
What motherboard are you using ?
Remove "rhgb" and "quiet" from the kernel boot line. Fixed.
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.