[indiana-discuss] Indiana Wish List

[Alan Coopersmith]

Mario Goebbels wrote:
> Here some wishes regarding the visuals, since a lot of the system experience is in that:
> 
> - A decent out-of-the-box theme for Gnome. Both Metacity and GTK. Don't be shy asking from the public community, like Gnome-Looks or whoever else. Nimbus is nice, but not attractive enough. I guess even Clearlooks would do, which seems to be default in a lot of Linux distros.
> 
> - Support for high color splashscreens, where possible.
> 
> For instance, the x86 hardware environment usually boasts support for VESA, so that shouldn't be a problem. A solution could be driver based, since GRUB seems incapable for the requested scenario. Said splashscreen driver is the first to be fired up by the kernel, which then immediately copies the splashscreen from the boot archive (or whatever else place, since it needs to be user customizable) to the screen.
> 
> Improvements to that, would be sort of a simple API, to manage a progress bar and render one or two text lines into the splashscreen. The positioning would be controllable by the API or some attributes in the splashscreen file itself. Text and progressbar display could be used to display what's currently happening, e.g. by the kernel and the SMF framework. The splashscreen would disappear when the appropriate SMF milestone has been reached (e.g. single/multi user mode), and switch back to text mode (or not, if the graphical-login service is enabled, to prevent unnecessary mode switching).

This was prototyped a while ago as part of a Sun-internal project named
"CoolStart", and you can see some of it by following the instructions in
Jan's blog at <http://blogs.sun.com/setje/> - but as noted, the big
blocker there (which I don't think has yet been solved) is the lack of a
good way to deal with things going wrong that need console interaction -
errors reported from services or filesystems needing to fsck, etc.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering