Proposal: Set the bootmanager option in KDM by default to Grub

That's a nice feature! I agree, it should be enabled by default.

I agree this is a very nice feature.

However, Ubuntu/Kubuntu doesn't use Grub by default... on 1 architecture out of the 3 official ones : PPC.

I believe KDM settings are currently independent from the architecture, and I'm not sure of the consequences of activating it on architectures that don't have Grub. From the few tests I could do on PPC, it doesn't seem to affect KDM.

I think further tests should be done though.

I just saw that there is another problem then different architectures.

The needed functionality is no longer there in the current Grub packages of Debian and Ubuntu. Thus the KDM option doesn't work with Dapper's grub anyway.

See the last comment in
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63800

Strange though, according to the forum thread they did it in SUSE. Did SuSE add their own hack to grub then? Or maybe something has changed since that last comment.

btw, the setting indeed didn't have any effect on my system

I just took a look what SUSE Factory (10.1) does. Their GRUB package includes a script called 'grubonce', which modifies grub's menu.lst to set a default. And they patch kdm to use this script.

This settings works fine with an i386 on Dapper when it comes to KDM : I get the list of available kernels to boot on when I choose to reboot, but then grub doesn't boot on the kernel I've chosen.

With Bug #57066 now fixed, this option works again.

With that bug out of the way, it sounds like it's possible to target this for feisty. Would that be possible?

However, looking at some info on Grub2, ( https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/grub2 http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html ) I think this may be a feature that would be much easier to work with once this version comes out. We wouldn't have to deal with grubonce and other ugly hacks.

Though I would love to see this feature implemented in feisty, would it be more prudent to wait for grub2's release? What do you think Andreas?

Ideally this feature should work with whatever boot manager Feisty will use. But if there are problems getting this to work smoothly with grub1 then waiting for grub2 seems reasonable.

Has anyone really looked into this? It would be an easy task for us to do, especially since it is 2 years later and setting the option to Grub works great.

Jonathan, any ideas or comments?

Well, I'm probably not the Jonathan you had in mind, but I have some comments.

Currently we're using a file that I gather patches kdmrc at runtime. I think just adding BootManager=Grub to that file wouldn't work, since there isn't a BootManager entry in the file by default.

Wouldn't work anyway.

I looked into this some months ago, so I am trying to remember properly what the problem is ;-)
In order to use this feature our grub would need to support a "--default" argument, IIRC KDM will invoke something like
  grub --batch --no-floppy savedefault --default=1 --once
which is supposed to set a specific grub entry as default for one boot. I am not sure why, but (aside from the fact that our grub doesn't support --default) this isn't too easily possible.

Suse has a wrapper script for setting the default boot option. IIRC it writes a file to /boot stating which entry to use (which is much more sensible than editing menu.list IMHO).

Anyway, before we fiddle with that setting we should make sure it works :P
Also I am not sure it is desirable to have this by default since it might be confusing.

Doesn't support grub2 at this point, so it would be pretty useless on anything > 9.10