Bug#775527: live-images: upgrade splash to Jessie theme

Greetings,

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 1:42 PM, jnqnfe <jnqnfe@gmail.com> wrote:

On 08/02/2015 01:28, Richard Nelson wrote:
> For live-medium-install I changed my dependecy from
> syslinx-themes-debian to desktop-base which happens to include
> /usr/share/images/desktop-base/lines-grub.png. Perhaps this could be
> just copied to isolinux.png since I am using it and it appears nice.

That is not the image we want, that's the splash used for an "installed"
grub bootloader. Juliette created and provided this in her Lines theme
package [1], and I accidentally used it in the first version of my
775527 patch.

First forgive me for not taking the time to say "Thank you" to Juliette for the very, very nice theme!

I offered the above resource as a suggestion for three reasons:

1. I elected to use it.
2. Available for use in a package now,
3. I much preferred it over the isolinux.

To me it seems very redundent to have multiple backgrounds for boot loaders. I am sure there is some technical reason, but the menuing can be clearly labeled such as Live, Grub, etc all use case, or even make your own if that is what you desire. But providing a baseline unified boot background for all cases to leverage would make sense. Now if booting live media _must_ require a different background (again not sure why) then have an installed boot background and a live background for theme submission. Furthermore it seems very logical to me to include them in some package, say desktop-base so other packages can avoid reinventing the wheel.

Juliette also provided a syslinux version, which is simply a black
background with grey/white logos, a tweaked update of the existing one
used at least in live images created and provided by the debian-cd team.
This again is not actually what we want.

What we want is a Lines version of the splash used by the official
install discs. Juliette did not provide this in the downloadable
lines-theme archive. The debian-cd team seem to have perhaps created a
png version of this themselves, which you can find buried in a
debian-cd_info archive in the mirrors. However:
1) No svg version is supplied.
2) The swirl logo is slightly different if you look really closely, to
the version I produced from the very latest Lines theme assets archive
(I haven't looked at older ones to try and understand why).
3) The addition of the 'GNU/Linux' text, (for which Juliette provided no
asset, so I assume the debian-cd team just copied and pasted from the
Wheezy splash), looks awful (as it does in the official Wheezy install
discs). The Wheezy svg that has been distributed via live-images may
have been a recreation; as this bit of text at least was different (and
better) than the official splash, though the rendering of this text was
still somewhat poor after being converted to a png (bug in the
conversion software perhaps?), which can be improved by converting the
text to a path (shapes).

So, not knowing whether Julliette might be too busy, undertook
generating a suitable splash for us myself (and gave a copy to the
debian-cd team) to use for install/live media. I used the latest archive
of Juliette's Lines assets, and replaced the 'GNU/Linux' text with an
entirely new copy, rendered in the same 'liberation sans' font as the
previous live-images svg had used, and converted to a path this time.
The final copy of which (v4) is available attached to bug #775527.

I did look at that image generated by the said patch, and the image looks nice.

I have actually since found an svg buried in the d-i source code
(build/boot/x86/pics/lines.svg). The swirl is still slightly different
to the one I used. The 'GNU/Linux' text doesn't look as bad as the png
in the debian-cd_info archive, so I'm wondering if its buggy conversion
software that's to blame, if that is responsible for the difference.

I haven't heard back at all from the debian-cd theme about the tweaked
splash I sent them.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Lines

Perhaps the resolution to this bug has the potential to improve the landscape of backgrounds for booting and also provide unification of theme work for the most fantastic Debian operating system.