Re: color boot text

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence <tomble@usermail.com>]

Hi,
you wrote:
> > If I remember correctly, a friend running red hat had color text
> > while his machine was booting. Is there a howto on how to set this
> > up?
> 
> ...Red Hat's init scripts do some really bizarre things, but one of
> the consequences of this is that they print output in a ~standard
> format with a green "OK" or a red "failed".  Debian doesn't have the
> seventeen-levels-deep-of-included-sh-script thing going, but this
> means that there's also no obvious/standard way for packages' init
> scripts to do the "pretty" output.  There's not an easy way to set
> this up for every package, though it is possible in principle to
> modify everything in /etc/init.d to do what you want.
 Could it be possible to create a program, lets call it "colourify"
 for example (I don't know of one), such that when the init scripts
 run a program, they direct the program's standard error (or standard
 output if appropriate) stream into "colourify", and colourify then
 uses the exit status of the program to determine whether it succeeded
 or failed. Having determined that, colourify then dumps the text that
 was fed to it in the appropriate colour- IIRC, the Linux console
 type uses the same escape codes as xterms and other things, which
 are in the Xterm postscript documentation.
 OK, I'm not sure that you could have a program receive another
 processes output *and* detect its exit status in one go, but y'know...
 I'm sure something like this is possible without too much effort
 (though you'd prolly not want to for fsck's progress bar things).

 Tomble


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