Joseph Smith wrote:
On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:55:55 -0400, Joseph Smith joe@settoplinux.org wrote:
Attached is a little ditty of my vision for FILO 1.0. Feedback is welcome.
I haven't gotten any feedback on this yet, what does everyone think?
In general, I like it.
Comments:
Numbered prompts. A curses-style menu might look nicer, if it's practical.
Manual boot vs. commandline. First, I thank a manual boot should drop out of the curses-type interface into a more normal command prompt. (what we now call the grub-style interface). Second, those functions are basically the same, so no need to separate them. Just have the default "manual boot" value be the configured commandline value.
Location of filo.conf. If it turns out to be impractical to store the full filo.conf location in flash or CMOS, having a hardcoded path with selectable drive would be good alternative. (and storing just the drive in NVRAM would certainly be reasonable.)
New automatic boot interface: It should prompt for a specific keystroke to interrupt the autoboot, not just say "you have 5 seconds". Delete would be a good option, for consistency with vendor BIOSes.
Settings menu: It might be good to take a page from the BIOS vendors here, and have curses-style settings. e.g. up/down to select; space, left/right, text entry to change a setting; display a text description of the currently-selected option near the bottom of the screen. Boot method: Manual [configured commandline], Menu [configured filo.conf location], Boot timeout [number]
filo.conf boot: I especially think it would be better to stick with the grub-style menu here
-Alex Mauer "hawke"