Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Mar 1997 22:06:59 -0500 | From | Eric Youngdale <> | Subject | Re: Now, why didn't we think of this before? |
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>>I'd also like to see much better boot management. The idea of an OS booting >>to a textual display in 1997 is ridiculous. > > No, it isn't. It's not as pretty as booting to a no-icky-text-here > graphical display, but it's perfectly usable. But be that as it > may, are you working on such a thing? I'm doing research into a > modification that will drop a boot picture onto the system (probably > the NT login banner, so dimwitted managers won't run shrieking in > terror at the thought of a usable OS in their hands) and would be > happy to drop it like a hot potato if someone else was already doing > the work.
Actually, HPUX has a really cool display as it boots up. All in regular ASCII mode. It starts by putting a checklist on the screen, and then as various tasks are completed, it fills in the box with an 'OK', or a 'FAILED' depending upon what happened. This effectively requires the output of init to go to the log file so that some other utility can drive the screen. The 'FAILED' is in red, the OK is in either white or green (I cannot remember). Really nice in that it wasn't overly verbose, but you could see where the bootup was and you could tell at a glance whether there was a problem or not. There were more than 24 lines on their checklist, so you could use the scroll-up/scroll-down buttons to examine the entire thing.
On the other extreme, you have AIX. On what is arguably one of the faster machines around, you have one of the slowest bootup sequences I have ever seen. It does put up a nice pretty picture with colored balls, however, so you aren't left to contemplate a blank screen.
-Eric
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