Pre-Login Choice of OS

[jmadero]

Just floating an idea...

There are quite a few people who multi boot different OS's (or different distros of the same OS) and that have multiple users on a computer. How difficult would it be to have basically a pre-grub login, you put in your user name and password and your "choice of Distro/OS" is auto loaded (instead of going to the Grub page. So if Johnny wants Ubuntu loading but Samantha wants Kubuntu or OpenSuse, it's just a matter of entering your user name before Grub comes up (or as a grub replacer) and that automatically enters your information into the login for that OS as well (so you're not getting redundant username and password requests).

[Cabhan]

It's an interesting idea. The main problem that I see is that users only currently exist at the OS level: anything pre-OS can't know what users/passwords are actually available.

It also, of course, leaves the problem of the same user existing on several OSes.

Having said that, if this was to be implemented, I would basically see it as an add-on to your bootloader that aggregated the user information of each of your OSes. I'm not sure exactly how it would log you into your OS, but I could see it selecting a particular OS for you.

[jmadero]

I had thought of this as well (the same user on multiple OS's). I see a couple solutions...

1. If you have multiple OS's for one user then Grub kicks in and lists them
2. Suggest that users use different user names (even if same person) for different OS's (I do this already as I hate having issues come up, such as mixing KDE with Gnome on the same user....always leads me awry).

The other problems...would be difficult to overcome I think...Maybe some developers could figure them out though

[GNU-Fan]

Why should there be any password protection at all?
Just set the GRUB entries to the user's names (Tom's OS; Christine's OS, etc.) and
have the machine boot to the desktop without querying any credentials.

As I understand it, all persons have physical access to the machine, so why bother to password protect it? There is no security gain achieved by doing this.

JYou can switch off the passworded login in most display managers (like KDM, GDM ...) so the user isn't harassed until he wants to become root.

[jmadero]

I personally am a fan of having a password....but the option isn't really for the password (I would say that if there is no password set then you could just enter your username and push enter). It's more to avoid the Grub list every time, having to scroll through them, choose your OS, enter your information after the load (if you have password set...) etc...

By doing this it'd just be a simple "enter username" and it would load the OS of choice...I know that Grub is an amazing loader but sometimes it gets annoying having 3 distros all with their corresponding safe mode (I know you can remove these in the Grub config but then you are left without a safe mode if something goes wrong...or just to test things that you've done), plus on top of that memtest, and any other things you have. Plus you get the 10 seconds (also can make this less I know) but with this, you turn your computer on, gets past bios, asks immediately for username/password, push enter, nothing else to do, auto loads into your distro/OS of choice

[Jonathan183]

I prefer the bootloader to be just that ... not a user management system for multiple OS as well. I think grub does a good job as a bootloader & that is what it should focus on ... just my opinion.