Quiet boot

[jg]

Right now, booting spews all the boot messages on the console. This slows the boot process (due to scrolling), and wastes power, as well as being unsightly. And we know Nicholas to well to know he'll let the current situation last forever.

I'm partial to the style of boot I now see on modern Linux systems, with progress bars.

There is also a UI question here: what should our OLPC splash screen look like during system boot.

This is an opportunity for someone to get involved, until Nicholas starts complaining and forcing our hands...

[Eben]

This has already been dealt with from a UI perspective. The ideal startup and shutdown behavior is spec'd in #692, and the visual design elements including a .png image for the splash screen are found in #534. I look forward to seeing some of this actually make it onto the machines. The sooner the better, in my opinion, since the black & white boot messages really remove the clean & simple kid-friendly aesthetic of the design we're aiming for.

As a sidenote, this startup sequence also integrates seamlessly with the first-launch intro sequence design, which Marco plans to integrate as well.

[bernie]

I have patches ready for the kernel, Sugar and startup scripts to beautify our boot sequence somewhat.

Kernel console color scheme matches OFW, penguin logo replaced by OLPC logo, display freeze around X and Sugar startup to minimize visual glitches. Please, come over to my desk if you want to see the actual result.

I also have a simple program by Mitch to display bitmaps in the framebuffer in the style of OFW. We could also use Ubuntu's usplash if we want a progress bar, but I got little enthusiasm from the others for this solution.

Reducing kernel messages to the console can be achieved easily by adding "quiet" to the kernel command line in /boot/olpc.fth.

This topic has been discussed at length in IRC, by private mail and on the devel mailing-list. The only issue blocking these changes to go in is finding general agreement on a few implementation details.

[bernie]

Partially depends on #1868.

[bernie]

jg, Eben, as you know, I have been working on this bug before, so I have the some of the needed pieces sitting idle.

We have a functional spec of how it should look, but different people had different opinions on how this should be implemented in practice, therefore everything stalled.

Would you like me to come up with my solution? Or would someone want to suggest a totally different design?

Any plan would be fine with me as long as it can be done in practice and it's going to be accepted without too much resistance by the relevant maintainers.