Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 28 Jun 1996 13:47:44 +0200 (MDT) | From | Michael De La Rue <> | Subject | Re: Boot messages (Was: Re: Ideas for v2.1) |
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On Wed, 12 Jun 1996, Alan Cox wrote:
> > resides, and nothing else. I vote for suppressing _all_ this mess unless > > somebody boots with the ``verbose'' option. Something like: > > Its not clear we should because there are some messages that definitely > ought to be kept - Copyright messages on boot > > Caldera's non verbose boot option offended several people >
Whilst this is being discussed I'd like to put another push in for something to be done about getting more friendly messages for people using braille terminals / speech synthesisers as the console.
The basic problem here is that it's impossible to feed info in at the rate you send to the screen (a braille terminal is normally 40x2 which compares rather badly with 80x25 let alone bigger monitors).
With a braille terminal it is (often) possible to go back and look over the whole area of the screen (80x25) as long as it is static.
It would be nice if:-
the booting could be made less verbose under some circumstances (print a number per section? Basic assumption has to be that the person can get to documentation and probably a working (backup) linux system to go and get info on this)
booting could be marked up somewhat (I like the idea of having some kind of markup on printk messages. Perhaps this should go in with some kind of internationalisation?)
The screen can be arranged so it always contains a summary of what has been detected and where (as was suggested by someone)
It's possible to select very specifically which hardware is reporting info.
Copyright messages should possibly scroll by in the bottom half of the terminal whilst this summary goes in the top?
This is particularly important for blind people who are administering their own system.
Presumably this kind of code could be thrown away after initialisation, if anyone works out an easy way to do that.
These are just my thoughts so that anyone who is working on this can take into account these ideas. If you are working on this and want any more details and explanations of the way this stuff works, please get in touch with your questions and I'll answer or find it out for you (if I don't know it already, then I probably want to anyway).
Michael
<http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~mikedlr/biography.html> Scottish Climbing Archive: <http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~mikedlr/climbing/> Linux/Unix clone@ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/linux/sunsite.unc-mirror/docs/
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