Bug 760320

Summary: grub2's menu entries are so verbose as to be useless
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Tom Lane <tgl>
Component: grub2Assignee: Peter Jones <pjones>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 16CC: dennis, hhorak, mads, pjones
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Hardware: Unspecified   
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Last Closed: 2013-02-13 21:13:03 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Tom Lane 2011-12-05 20:33:13 UTC
Description of problem:
On an installation with multiple kernels and multiple potentially bootable partitions, you can't tell what's what because the menu entries are so long that critical information disappears off the right side of the menu window.  As an example, on a laptop that I just updated to F16, the entries for the previous-generation versions look like

Fedora (2.6.40.6-0.fc15.x86_64) (on /dev/mapper/vg_rhlap-LogVol02)
Fedora 15 x86 (2.6.38.8-35.fc15.i686.PAE) (on /dev/mapper/vg_rhlap-LogVol02)
Fedora (2.6.40.6-0.fc15.x86_64) (on /dev/mapper/vg_rhlap-LogVol03)
Fedora 15 x86 (2.6.38.8-35.fc15.i686.PAE) (on /dev/mapper/vg_rhlap-LogVol03)

which is problematic because the "LogVolNN" bit disappears off the right side of the textual menu at boot time, meaning I have to guess which system I'm booting.  It doesn't help that some of these combinations aren't ones I'd ever be interested in booting, and likely don't work at all.

Also, I observe that grub.cfg now tells you not to edit it, which means I can't replace these entries with something that would actually be useful to me.  That's a huge loss of usability.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
grub2-1.99-12.fc16.x86_64

How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Install multiple Fedora systems.
2.  Reboot.
3.  Observe that GRUB menu entries are too long for the available window width, and there's no apparent provision for editing them.

Comment 1 Mads Kiilerich 2011-12-08 19:23:10 UTC
You can edit the file. But it will only be overwritten by anaconda on next upgrade or by running grub2-mkconfig manually to pick up some new settings in /etc/default/grub . The warning is thus real, but editing the texts (and doing it again after next update) shouldn't be a problem.

Comment 2 William Makowski 2013-01-06 14:17:58 UTC
You may have figured this out already, but as a workaround, you can edit the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file with what you like and it will be picked up by grub2-mkconfig.  It won't get rid of the crummy generated entries, but it will give you something that makes sense.  For the record, I don't like grub2 menu entries either. Too verbose and many of them do not work or when generated have invalid parameters.

Comment 3 Fedora End Of Life 2013-01-16 16:58:28 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 16 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 16. It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
'version' of '16'.

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Comment 4 Fedora End Of Life 2013-02-13 21:13:10 UTC
Fedora 16 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-02-12. Fedora 16 is 
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further 
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of 
Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version.

Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.