Fedora safe/recovery mode

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 23:04 -0600, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> It seems like a common enough recurrence that someone, often times a
> person new to Fedora needs to boot to runlevel 3. Seems like it would
> be advantageous to have a boot target that goes to runlevel 3 all the
> time.
> 
> What does the list think?

-1:

First, inexperienced users would equate this with functionality (?) in
Windows and expect a GUI, and when they didn't get it, would instead get
the mistaken impression it was a bug.  In cases where something more
horrendous was broken, like a file system problem that needed
intervention/checking, this doesn't really help since almost any
runlevel target drops them to the same maintenance (root password)
prompt.

Second, anyone "new" trying to perform fixes requiring a different
runlevel, console skills, and so forth, would have to check all the
normal information sources (including books, FAQs, forums, friends, et
al.), which multitudinously include the advice for editing the GRUB boot
configuration.  If a fix is going to require editing an X configuration
file, certainly it's a much lower bar to require adding " 3" (or
whatever) to a line in the boot loader.

Third, when there's an X problem, in many cases the system will already
present a configuration error dialog and drop the user back to a getty
for login -- not always, but very often.

IMHO this would be misleading and have dubious value.  We already
provide functionality with the intallation discs and/or the rescue ISO
that is much like a Windows recovery console (booting from the
installation CD).  Maybe you're looking for a failsafe "vesa" type X
configuration, but this seems like a real quagmire looking for unwary
developers to swallow up.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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