[Splashy-devel] Splashy moving forward

[Luis Mondesi]

On 7/26/07, Olivier Blin <blino at mandriva.com> wrote:
> "Luis Mondesi" <lemsx1 at gmail.com> writes:
> Right, we consider switching to splashy for the next Mandriva
> release.

Good. That means that some of the RPM related bugs will be iron out
and some nice spec file will result from the work of the Fedora, SuSE
and Mandriva developers.

I'll get the spec file you mentioned (as well as the sources) and
attempt to apply those patches to the source in trunk (if they are not
distro-specific of course).

> First, the binary size is quite huge (splashy is about 2M in our full
> static build), which will make our initramfs consequently bigger, and
> may lead to slower boot times.

We tested boot times and it seemed that adding Splashy to the system
from initramfs incremented boot time by 4 seconds. Since this was so
negligible, we never really focus on optimizing the size of Splashy
much. Now we can revisit that problem. At some point Otavio suggested
that we drop glib2 altogether and implement everything using
libc6+custom functions. But, this is a big task.

> Then, there may be an interval when non-graphical kernel messages are
> displayed, between the bootloader screen and splashy start. How do
> other distributions manage to get a fully graphical boot?

Ubuntu solves this by adding "quiet" to as a kernel paramenter and
removing whatever strings were printed so that the screen is totally
blank. So, from grub/lilo->init->splashy you only see a blank screen.
I'm not sure how Xandros or other distros do this.

> And finally, we used to have background images in TTYs with
> bootsplash, and we'd like to keep them. According to Luis, this can be
> achieved in userspace with a DirectFB-aware daemon that does not steal
> focus on TTY. Is there any prototype of such an application?

Good luck with that. I'm tempted to start writing a prototype that
would do this (and perhaps putting it in "branches"). However, I think
that most users who care about having a graphical boot splash (or who
are new to Linux on their desktops) probably will never use a tty
directly. It's still a nice thing to do (the effect is great if you
ever need to use it), but, probably is an exercise in futility. dunno.

Regards,

-- 
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Luis Mondesi

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