[Splashy-devel] Re: Splashy 0.1.x and the future of bootsplashing

[Luis M]

Hello Paul,

(moving thread to splashy-devel, where it should be)

read my answers below:

On 3/20/06, Paul Wise <pabs3 at bonedaddy.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 10:12 -0500, Luis M wrote:
>
> > Your ideas (and patches and bug reports and social support) are welcome!
>
> Stuff I noticed in 0.1.6 (no i386 0.1.7 deb tested yet):
>
> splashy should fade from the splash to the login manager (or the
> console) in a smooth transition.

this is a frequently requested feature. All the infrastructure to do
it is right there, all i need is a bit of time to "spell it out". in
short, directfb supports alpha and we are using this in our themes.xml
files. this has been in our TODO file (or feature requests in the
project tracker) for some time. i might do this as soon as the end of
this week.

>
> If I press F2 to hide splashy, it should NOT complain that splashy isn't
> running at the end of the boot sequence.

this is what i'm working on now. and with a patch submitted by Pat on
st. Patrick's day (last Friday), the support for that has been
accelerated. We should be done in 2 or so days with that.

>
> It would be nice if you could press F2 a second time to go back to
> splashy.

toggling verbose mode is part of what i said earlier. it should take
me another 2 hours to add that, once the verbose mode is fully in
place.

>
> Questions:
>
> How does splashy compare to usplash/gensplash (and other distro's
> user-space boot splash efforts), perhaps the efforts could be merged, or
> have they already been?

splashy is the answer for the awkward implementation of those very 2
systems. I'll write that in the WIKI so that i don't have to repeat it
everytime ;-)

essentially, to put all in a simple paragraph, bootsplash was the
beginning. we ported to debian and made .deb's for it (a lot of
duplicate effort if you ask me). then came gensplash, making it a bit
better, and we ported that to debian (debsplash on alioth.debian.org),
while at the same time we started working with the Ubuntu developers
about usplash (Thanks to Vicenzo Alfonso's ideas). We sweep the
internet for anybody doing this and found out about Xandros, Knoppix,
RedHat, and others doing exactly the same thing, all in various
disparate ways and none trying to be backward compatible with e/a
other. Usplash (Ubuntu's approach) was the only one with a spec about
how to do it. We follow this spec earlier and did a C++ version that
implemented most of the functionality needed. ubuntu's developers
asked us to drop the usplash name because they were already doing this
(against bogl library) and we did. And also ported the whole thing to
C... To make a long story short, Splashy just kept growing faster than
the other ones, so, we had to deviate from the original specs a bit.
we will, however, go back to usplash and implement most if not all the
stuff that the current usplash on Ubuntu does, so that Splashy becomes
the sole bootsplashing system that you would ever need... hopefully.

they all have their own advantages and disadvantages (audience
targets?). Ubuntu's usplash uses bogl to keep things small and simple.
Which is a good and bad thing if you ask me (see how much effort it
takes to do your own theme). Splashy is a 1mb binary (statically
compiled), so, i might be too big for some systems. And it's only
really supported under 2.6.x kernels (2.6.12 if you want initramfs
support). So, without patching the kernel, Splashy is perhaps the one
that gives you more bang for the buck.

>
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/breezy/misc/usplash
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/gensplash/
>
> I was upgrading a Mandrake 9.2 LTSP box to sarge+backports the other
> month, and I remember Mandrake's bootup messages were overlayed on a
> colourful Mandrake background, cropped into a box to make it look like a
> sub-screen. Does splashy allow something like this?
>

Thanks to Pat's patch, it does just that.

> Would it be possible to split all but one of the themes into a separate
> source package, so people don't have to download such a large source
> package to build i386 debs?

We talked about this previously. The reason why we kept the themes
into a single directory was to make things easier while packaging
(debian packages). But since splashy and splashy-themes are two
separate packages, it does make sense to have separate build trees
(sources) as well. I'll split the source before 0.1.8 is released
(perhaps by next Monday if no major bugs are reported).

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.

--
----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator
Kiskeyix.org

"We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and
you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on" --
Steve Jobs in an interview for MacWorld Magazine 2004-Feb

No .doc: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.es.html