[Suggestion] LILO-like direct menu item access

[Marc-Jano Knopp]

Hi all!

I'm only an end user, but didn't find another way to suggest something
for GRUB 2 except for this mailing list, so here we go:

There is one reason I do not employ GRUB everywhere: With LILO, you
can blindly select a specific menu item, which you cannot with GRUB
(at least with GRUB 0.92).

I can assign numbers or different letters to the LILO menu items and so
directly and blindly access them, independently from the current
selection bar position, not having to switch on a monitor (or even
actually have one attached). And at least a year ago or so, I could not
find anything in the GRUB documentation to make this work.

Now, while you're at it, could you add such a feature to GRUB 2?
Especially having letters to select menu items would be very helpful
(l = Linux, f = FreeBSD, n = NetBSD, d = DOS, ...).

Maybe this could be done by introducing a LILO-menu-mode acting
the way I described, with e.g. special escape- or control-key-
sequences to directly select LILO-menu- and GRUB-mode (ESC-g/l or
whatever), with the default mode being definable in /etc/grub.conf,
errrr, /boot/grub/menu.lst or whatever.

Oh, and... while this might be possible using some kind of script
(just read shortly about a pre-alpha scripting engine), a touch of
user-friendliness like a simple grub.conf entry like "key", e.g.

  title SuSE 7.3 (2.4.29)
  root (hd0,2)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 vga=extended rootflags=data=journal
  key l

would be nice. :-)


Best regards

  Marc-Jano

P.S.: If this behavior is already possible with GRUB legacy, please let
      me know how!