Re: New panel logout/shutdown alert - a mini ui review

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 16:57 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> If you know a better way to boot into a Live CD or partition containing
> another operating system I'd love to hear it but I quite often use Restart
> for exactly that purpose.  (I had and installation of Mandrake and Redhat
> awkwardly coexisting on the same machince for a while.)  If there was
> another program I could use which would allow me to choose Reboot to
> "Other Operating System" I would probably use it instead of having to wait
> for GRUB to appear.

A good example. During the time that I was playing on-line games, I
would often reboot into Windows, so that I could play those games. While
ideally, one shouldn't need to reboot, a large portion of our audience
is going to be doing exactly that. We don't have the ISV support to
avoid needing to reboot that often. And given the people moving from
Windows, to Linux, who are used to rebooting at every install, they are
going to probably do it until they realize they don't have to,
regardless of where you put the button in the UI.

And frankly, Linux is very much at the point where you often need to
reboot after installing updates. Think about dbus, hal, and other
core pieces of software. D-BUS is not exactly the friendliest piece
of code to avoiding reboots, since killing it breaks everything that
uses it. This could very well mean "your internet connection" if you
are using NetworkManager, which many distributions are switching to.

-- dobey

PS: For "reboot to this os", you can do lilo -R <label> if you use lilo.
I am not sure if there is a similar option for grub stuff.