[Splashy-devel] Adding progress text.

[Luis M]

On 2/21/06, Pat Suwalski <pats at xandros.com> wrote:
> 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

Hello Pat,

As if you were fallen from heaven... I love Xandros. I used it for a
while and gave it away to a bunch of my friends (the Open version of
it of course).

When we first started developing a bootsplashing system, I looked into
the kernel patch you guys were using to accomplish this. Eventually we
settle for fbsplash (gentoo's patch. gensplash project). Which we
ported to debian as debsplash. That had a lot of shortcomigs and we
ended up starting again from 0.

Now, fast forward a year...

I've been working on adding font support to Splashy for a while and I
was just about to give up and move on. The reason is that when we
compile Splashy on debian/ubuntu, the package doesn't include the
needed .o files and it shows as if there is no font implementation.
Doesn't work. If you look in the mailing list archives (splashy-devel)
you will see that we sent an email to the DD in charge of packaging
libdirectfb for debian to see if we can fix this problem some other
way.

Now, you seem to have something working already. This is good news. I
have nothing against using bitmap fonts or adding a "print" command to
Splashy. That's a good approach. Let's get together in IRC (#splashy
on irc.freenode.net) and discuss this further. Or else, you can always
reply to this message and I'll apply your paches to our svn.

Thanks Pat for your help. Now I can concentrate in getting Splashy to
work from a initramfs ramdisk (or something else in our long and never
ending TODO file).

Cheers,

--
----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator
Kiskeyix.org

"We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and
you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on" --
Steve Jobs in an interview for MacWorld Magazine 2004-Feb

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