Martin Alderson wrote:
Hi,
So I had a brief look at shortening startup/login time and tried disabling rhgb in favor of starting gdm early. It looks pretty promising; here are some wall-clock numbers from two runs of each configuration
Is it possible to have a very simple boot screen, ala Windows XP and MacOSX? It should be animated so that people can see if the computer is frozen?
Basically it would be very good if as soon as you went into grub, about 2 seconds later you had a graphical boot screen.
Can this be done without using X? Is there some sort of really simple X server-style application that could do this?
This would be my own personal favourite way of approaching the problem. By popping up a low res (say 640x480ish) screen like XP does, and having a crappy 16 color image with a simple scroller, it is an improvement over raw text mode visually, and lets the computer boot up fast which trumps any gui eye candy effects in my opinion.
It depends ultimately on wether users are more interested in seeing their desktops *now*, or if they're more interested in seeing GUI eye candy I guess.
For the sake of argument, lets say we honed booting to the point where what is currently rhgb - took 1 second to display. What would be the point of the eye candy displayed for 1 second then? Nothing really useful IMHO. Any eye candy is at best - only useful if there is a long wait.