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SubjectRe: Simple, effective boot graphic
Date
> On Thu, 20 Jun 1996, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
> > No, it MUST. You are one of many who have missed the point.
> > If you can find someone with a Mac (retail store even), ask
> > them to let you see the Mac boot. The Mac will actually smile
> > at you. It most definitely does not spew technobabble.
>
> But I LIKE the technobable! When I first booted Linux after having
> only experienced DOS/Windows and Mac, I though "WOW! an OS that actually
> tells you what's going on during the boot process."

I agree. I see the logo/animation as something slick to impress your friends
with, not the same purpose as the smiling mac. Mac people don't use Linux--
yet. They never will be able to really administrate it either without becoming
somewhat more "serious geeks". The more technobabble the better, but it
should cooperate artistically with the animation, and you should be able to
customize the animation, perhaps obscuring the babble if you do indeed want
to create a "smiling penguin" ala the "smiling mac". If it can be customized
just by replacing the animation file then everybody can have it as they like.

On a similar note, it seems to me that initialization code in general, and
especially the logo animation code, ought to be discardable. Then the
user space/kernel space distinction wouldn't be as important. Why can't
that be done? The boot process should result in all this init stuff being
put in separate segments, executed, and then the last thing the kernel should
do before "going multiuser" would be to mark those segments discardable. I'm
no protected mode guru so my terminology may be wrong, but I think those
concepts exist don't they? You'd have a bigger kernel at first, but when
people say "the kernel ought to be kept as small as possible" they really
mean at runtime right? To economize on the amount of memory that's always
taken up by this monolithic nondiscardable indivisible thing we call the kernel.
And of course it should be possible to omit the animation if you really do
have a machine so tight on memory that it can't ever run the animation, in user
space or otherwise.

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