some things in grub didn't feel right to me.
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let me know which of the following make sense and i'll
see if i can prepare patches for some of the simpler
things. (otoh, given that i don't know how to compile
stuff yet, let alone construct patches, nor do i even
know C, it'll take me a while...)
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to install grub from a grub floppy to my hard drive's mbr,
i decided to edit the 'install grub from hard drive to mbr'
entry in the default menu then run the modified entry.
to do this i hit the 'e' key twice, made my change, hit Enter
once, then pressed 'b'.
several things and thoughts happened along the way that didn't
feel right. this email is about those things.
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1. it felt a shame to require use of letter keys to do
actions from the menu rather than use the menu interface
itself. is there a way to add a "shell" entry to the menu?
i'll leave the issue of 'e' for edit till point 4 below,
when i suggest an approach that uses menu selection for
for more actions within the menu related screens.
2. it felt strange to press 'b' to run the grub install
commands (root and install). i hesitated to do it. i wasn't
trying to boot anything. perhaps 'r' for run? or, consider
point 4 below.
3. it felt odd that i couldn't press enter to return to
the main menu. i can see a reason why not: the edited
command is not the same as the item on the menu cuz its
been edited, and this introduces a number of isses. still,
it felt odd. this is another thing that lead to point 4:
4. here's my new menu behavior suggestion. when the user
hits enter from the main menu, grub displays a Run screen
that lists the commands behind that menu entry, and rests
the cursor on a line that says 'run' (or 'boot' or
'run/boot' or whatever). if one hits enter again, the
commands are run. one can cursor off the run onto the
command lines below. this behaves as per the screen that
currently appears when u hit 'e' from the main menu,
except that pressing Enter edits a line. for backwards
compatibility, the various letter keys in the main menu
and edit screen can still do stuff much as they do now.
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5. i kept getting a "disk write error" when i tried to
install grub onto my hard drive. for a while i thought
the write error referred to my hard drive. it would be
helpful if read/write error messages included the device.
6. the 'd' for delete and 'o' and 'O' for insert in the
menu entry edit screen seem peverse. i would imagine that
u expect to change this (to use Del and Insert keys, at
least as an alternative, respectively) at some point, right?
to allow for the equivalent of inserting after the last
line, always add a blank line at the end of a menu entry.
7. the line edit mode is the same as the command line mode
except for the meaning of pressing Enter. how about having
the grub prompt be different between the two modes? i
suggest reverse video for line editing mode.
--
ralph mellor
