Plymouth animated startup

[Charlie Brej]

David Nielsen wrote:
> 
> 
> 2008/9/13 Charlie Brej <fedora-art at brej.org <mailto:fedora-art at brej.org>>
> 
>     In Fedora 10 there will be a new graphical startup program replacing
>     RHGB[1]. Its called Plymouth and it starts even earlier than rhgb.
>     You can see a demo of the current default fedora startup here[2].
>     The system works on plugins to allow different styles of splash
>     screens. To play around with it I wrote a plugin which uses
>     components of the InvinXble theme and animates them. You can see a
>     video of this[3]. It is still work in progress but it does not seem
>     too CPU intensive. I kept the plugin pretty general so it should be
>     easy to change it to suit any theme.
> 
>     What I would like is some feedback as to whether something like this
>     is desirable.
> 
>     [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterStartup
>     [2] http://katzj.livejournal.com/432586.html
>     [3] http://brej.org/test/plymouth_invx.mpg
>           and http://brej.org/test/plymouth_invx.gif
> 
> 
> That is definitely sexy, I do have one comment though. The current 
> plymouth splash has a progress bar, and as pretty as this is it doesn't 
> tell us anything about the boot progress so a user might be tempted to 
> think we stalled, any thoughts as to the need for such visual feedback?. 
> Aside that I love it.
> 
> - David

I was planning adding a progress bar (not necessarily a bar). Because the 
process starts before any disks have been mounted, it makes a timed progress bar 
a little complicated. I think I have a solution but I will need agreement of the 
developers. The best way is probably to have an estimated 1 minute timer, and as 
soon as the root is mounted we read the target time from the disk. We then write 
the boot time to the disk when we are finished averaged over multiple runs. This 
would more suited to be within the core rather than the plugin. A lot of the 
callback structures are already there to support this.