Using custom startup scripts with rhgb

[Gijs Hollestelle]

Hi,

At our university we have a script that runs at boot time, which
brings the system's packages up to date with a central server and does
some other configuration stuff (compare it to running yum update at
boot time). This script can take up to 5 minutes to complete but
includes progress meters so that the user can see what is happening,
this works nicely in the details pane of rhgb and when using text
mode.

This situation causes two problems under rhgb:

1) There appears to be no way of setting the caption (where it
normally says things like Starting Networking) for the text box field,
other than adding the string to the main.c file in rhgb. I would like
to be able to set a caption like 'Checking for updated packages' or
something alike.

2) If there is no rhgb ping command for 35 seconds rhgb swithces back
to terminal 1 (which does not show te progress, that is shown
correctly in the details pane, but displays only the start of the boot
process with two empty lines between every message). Is there a way to
disable this time-out (temporarily) other than hacking it away in the
main.c file?

If there is currently no way of doing these 2 without changing the C
code, would it be possible to add commands to rhgb-client to support
these? as I could imagine they would be useful to others as well.

Kind regards,
  Gijs Hollestelle