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SubjectBoot logo ideas (oh not again...)
Hello,


(I am not subscribed to the list. Please cc to me. Thanks.)


This is a followup to the recent boot logo discussion. There are a few
questions about adding features to the new console code in here.


Geert encouraged me to port "my" boot logo patch to 2.1.x (you can find
the 2.0.35 version at http://my.lava.de/~hanno/linux-bootlogo/). It could
solve most of the issues mentioned in the "Is the boot logo politically
correct?" discussion.

Before I come up with a few ideas and since the 2.1 version of the patch
is still vaporware, here is the status of the patch for 2.0:

- It displays in text mode by doing a few funky things to the vga font

- It comes with a little C program that creates the code needed for the
logo bitmap from a PBM file.

- Thus you can define your own logo very easily, but it has to be
monochrome.
(You can, however, have a black/white penguin, a red/black redhat, a
green/white suse chamelion, a blue/white stamped stallion etc.)

In other words, creating your own logo is very easy, but you have to
select it before compiling the kernel. The logo cannot be changed by
simply changing some file on the disk. Once the kernel can access the
disk, it is not very far to running the first boot script, so you could
use a normal user program for this, anyway.


I think that the boot logo is currently plain and simply useless. I have a
few ideas to make the boot logo something that's really useful, but I
wonder if others share this opinion.

The logo could be used for a "friendly greeting screen". While in "logo
mode", the console is divided into two parts at startup - the lower half
is used to display the standard kernel and boot messages. The messages
scroll within this text "window".

The upper half is used to display the greeting screen. It displays a logo
and a few basic, general information about the system. These messages pop
up as they are computed - so when there is a long and detailes message in
the lower window, the upper window only displays a brief summary of it.
The logo does not scroll away.

To turn off this "logo mode", a user program can echo something into
"/proc/bootlogo" (just like now). The text console is then cleared, the
logo disappears and the whole screen is used for the console.


This raises a question about the new console code.


I wonder if it is worth to add something like "windowing" code to the
console drivers since only the boot logo would need it to divide the
screen. But without it, dividing the screen into two parts certainly
becomes an ugly hack.


Opinions, anyone?


greetings,

Hanno





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