On Monday 08 October 2007 00:10:10 Rene Herman wrote:
> On 10/08/2007 12:40 AM, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
> > Splash screens are clearly cosmetic, and it's kind of shameful (imo) that
> > important messages explaining real problems are obscured from view by
> > functionless splash screens.
>
> They're not functionless. You (and I) might not care for the function, but
> their function is providing a "slick" bootup. That's why so many if not
> basically all distributions of recent origin use them. Go ask Ubuntu for
> example.
>
> > Personally, I think muddying the vga colour argument with splash screen
> > stuff is bogus, they're very functionally separable ideas. A coloured
> > oops seems to be a good way of telling novice users what information is
> > relevant to their bug report.
>
> But when they're hidden by a splash screen, you don't see them any better
> when they're red than when they're white. Splash screens were not mentioned
> as any sort of alternative, their prevalence was mentioned as indication
> that VGA console is only ever getting less important.
Obviously true, but that's not a reason to bar enhancements to the VGA
console. Right now, there's no sane way to have a splash screen in userspace
handle an oops, so people looking to reproduce and detect the root of a
problem will inevitably fall back to VGA (or vesa, presumably), where colour
might be useful.
I recall seeing a distro kernel oops early in boot, where the palette had been
corrupted by the splash so the oops wasn't readable. That's bad, right?
Don't get me wrong, I don't care for the feature much, I just don't
think "splash screens are defacto" is a reason to shy away from a feature
that could be useful for novices reporting kernel bugs. These people are
probably inbetween those that must have a shiny splash and those that fix the
kernel bugs.
Of course, what Alan said elsewhere about breaking things that work is a good
reason to not add the feature, or at least make it only happen on a real
display.
--
Cheers,
Alistair.
137/1 Warrender Park Road, Edinburgh, UK.
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