Faster login

[Mike A. Harris]

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.