Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 621547
RFE: Provide hotkey for temporary boot device selection
Last modified: 2011-05-05 03:43:54 EDT
Created attachment 436838 [details] example config dialog Description of problem: In an older libvirt release (I believe in Fedora 12) there used to be a hotkey (F12 key?) that could be pressed for temporary boot device selection, right after virtual machine start. Now in Fedora 13 this hotkey is no longer available. It would be very nice if the hotkey option is added again to libvirt, maybe just as an optional feature, that can be enabled in preferences. Because currently if you need to boot from other than your default boot device for just one shot, you need to open config dialog, click click click (and 10 more clicks), apply (see screenshot). Boot, and then revert everything back to original state. That's very inconvenient. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): python-virtinst-0.500.3-4.fc13.noarch virt-manager-0.8.4-2.fc13.noarch libvirt-0.8.2-1.fc13.x86_64 virt-viewer-0.2.1-1.fc13.x86_64 libvirt-python-0.8.2-1.fc13.x86_64 libvirt-client-0.8.2-1.fc13.x86_64 virt-top-1.0.4-3.fc13.x86_64
I think this could be done much better in virt-manager, in no extra mouse clicks compared to starting normally, and without adding a hotkey back which was hard to press quickly enough at boot. eg, the toolbar button for 'start' could be turned into a menu button. Pressing the button does a normal start, but it has drop down menu that has Start -> Boot network -> Boot floppy -> Boot cdrom If no media is loaded in the floppy/cdrom, it could automatically popup a filechooser dialog box too.
In virt-manager-0.8.7-2.fc14.noarch I see now checkbox "Enable boot menu" in Boot options. Marking as solved.