Faster login

[Martin Alderson]

> > 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?