Have Linux boot with eye-candy
Most distros these days don't show the boot messages scroll by in text
mode but have a frame buffer with some nice logos and graphics. Below
is some information from our kernel maintainer on this. I'm looking
for a volunteer who'd check how SuSE/Red Hat et al. do it and comes up
with something for Debian. For more information, see below.
----- Forwarded message from Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> -----
From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Subject: Re: Have Linux boot with eye-candy
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 21:16:16 +1000
On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 01:11:47PM +0200, Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader wrote:
> I briefly talked to the d-i guys at debconf about this, but realized
> that this is really a kernel issue. Red Hat, SuSE and all other major
> distros have a much nicer boot sequence than Debian. The don't show
> the text on a black background in text mode, but have the text
> displayed in a nice window and around it display their logo. I wanted
> to ask if something like this would be possible for Debian as well. I
> know it's only eye-candy. But this is what some people like, and I
> must confess it doesn't look kinda neat. I wonder if this is a
> problem on !i386, and if it is if we could at least have something
> like that for our 386 kernel. I've seen a great artwork we could use
> for this if it's technically possible.
Actually, this is no longer a kernel issue because of modularisation.
You can load frame buffer drivers in the initrd image, and then display
whatever you like on the console. Of course you need to take care to
redirect stdout/stderr of the startup scripts so that they don't clutter
the logo.
--
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ )
Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> -----
From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Subject: Re: Have Linux boot with eye-candy
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 22:41:45 +1000
To: Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
[...]
Once you load the fb driver a user space process can do arbitrary
graphical operations on the console. One way to apply this would be
to have a graphical manager process that displays the logo and
manages ptys through which the output of startup scripts are
gathered and then displayed on the screen.
Of course since this is user space the application is only limited
by the programmer's imagination :)
--
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ )
Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Martin Michlmayr
leader@debian.org
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