Re: [atomic-devel] Fedora 23 Cloud Atomic Developer Mode Preview

[Jeff Peeler <jpeeler redhat com>]

(Only replying on atomic-devel)

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Jonathan Lebon <jlebon redhat com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As some of you may already know, I've been working on adding
> a new feature to the Fedora 23 Cloud Atomic image called
> "Developer Mode" (I'm not sure yet if this is the correct
> name for it). The Trello card is available at [1].
>
> The high-level goal is to make Atomic more accessible by
> providing a new GRUB 2 menu item labeled e.g. "Fedora 23
> (Twenty Three) Developer Mode". This mode is an attempt to
> provide a painless experience for folks who want to try out
> Atomic, but (1) do not want to bother setting up a cloud-
> init datasource, or (2) do not know anything about cloud-
> init, or even (3) do not have much experience with
> Linux overall.
>
> Since the functionality is completely integrated into the
> image, there are no requirements on the host system, other
> than its ability to boot VMs.
>
> When booted in Developer Mode, the following happens:
>     - cloud-init uses a local built-in datasource
>     - a new root password is generated
>     - the root user is automatically logged in on tty1
>     - the cockpit/ws image is downloaded and started
>     - a tmux session is started on tty1 to provide all the
>       relevant information (root password, IP address,
>       Cockpit console address)
>
> The first Developer Mode image is available at [2]. I invite
> you all to try it out and let me know what you think! I've
> enabled the plymouth splash screen, which for now uses the
> Fedora theme, but might later be switched over to an Atomic
> theme.
>
> I'd still like to give users a more helpful welcome message
> after login. Maybe we could link to a new page on
> projectatomic.io which describes Developer Mode in more
> details.
>
> As Matthew Miller pointed out, one of the drawbacks of this
> approach is that the GRUB 2 menu timeout will probably have
> to be slightly increased to give users more time to make
> their selection (at the expense of also increasing boot
> times in contexts that don't care about Developer Mode).
>
> In my experience, increasing it by only 1s (for a total of
> 2s) was enough, but we should probably discuss it more. We
> can also minimize this by shipping with a grub.cfg that uses
> a 2s timeout, but with the default of 1s, so that at the
> next grub2-mkconfig (e.g. on an upgrade/rebase), it will go
> back to 1s.

For what it's worth, when trying this out I missed selecting the
option twice due to not having focus on the VM. Would say that
anything less than 5 seconds is making the option too hard to select.

The cockpit integration was a nice touch!