[Splashy-devel] Adding progress text.

[Pat Suwalski]

Hello,

I've been playing with splashy, and Xandros will be including it in our 
distribution.

I'd like to help develop some functionality that others might find 
useful. Since we're replacing a (very) legacy splash system (writes 
directly to video memory!), we need match functionality. The old system 
is able to display some very brief text messages in arbitrary positions 
on the screen. The idea is to give some very basic feedback about what 
is starting. Classically, we've done ethernet devices and a few other 
very simple things.

I've gotten text printing working quite well. I'll be trying to make it 
work with a bitmap font, as I think it could be a lot more efficient 
(sizewise) than the ft2 implementation. This is a consideration, since 
it will be going in our initrd.

My idea for displaying text is to add another command to the fifo scheme 
("print") and basically print up to \n or NULL. The initial 
implementation will default to printing near the upper-left, but I 
suppose it could have a configuration option for this.

Does anyone have a wishlist for this sort of functionality? If/when this 
gets done, I'll make certain to post a patch for review.

Splashy is a great program.
--Pat