[Splashy-devel] Splashy 0.1.x and the future of bootsplashing

[Luis M]

Hello all,

(Sorry for the cross-posting. I know some of you dislike this very
much, but this is such an important occasion. Just delete it if you
dont' care.)

This email is intended for those of us who took the initiative to make
Debian the best desktop operating system on the planet. We planned,
sketched, put our head together, and came up with very good points to
make the system not only usable, but friendly to the users and
enjoyable.

One of the missing parts of making Debian a good desktop operating
system, was it's lack to show users, early at boot, that this was not
a scary, unknown, new universe, but actually a tool that can get the
best out of your computer. A tool that allows you to do your job
easier, and overall, much more secure than many other OSes. This
"niche" needed a solution and we all discussed how to do this by
following 2 simple design concepts:

1. The application should be done in user-space, avoiding the
possibility to break the Kernel with every new patch
2. The application should be very similar in concept, to what was
known then (bootsplash), and allow a great range of customization

This had to be done without compromising system stability, security,
and other things. We set our course and started building Usplash,
which was Ubuntu's response to that very same problem. They only had
specs written, and not a single line of code was publicly known.
Eventually, we had to drop the name Usplash and use "Splashy" for our
project, that's after agreeing with the Ubuntu developers that this
was the best thing for both projects.

Implementation issues and history aside, after a year in development,
Splashy has reached a major milestone. Splashy right now is able to:

* configure splashy via XML files
* themes can be very granular about how to display their images (XML again)
* images in  millions of colors
* resolution as high as VESA supports 1280x1024 (and more if other
framebuffer drivers are used)
* supports gif animations
* detects errors and falls back to verbose mode (text printed on a
textbox overlayed on image)
* start very early at boot (from initramfs)
* text messages can be printed to the screen (for system messages)
* communications via a FIFO (named pipe) as well as signals (limited
to progressbar updates)
* multi-threaded
* very clean C code
* a very NICE init script that doesn't rely on rc/rcS or LSB functions
to do it's job
* and a really good community that constantly submit bug fixes/reports
and keep our IRC channel ready for answering newbies questions

Splashy has been in Debian Experimental for some time now, thanks to
our resident DD Otavio Salvador.

And lastly, but not least, we have attracted the attention of many
vendors and companies willing to replace their own archaic, bootsplash
systems with Splashy.

Put all that together, and we have a rock solid application that is
not going anywhere anytime soon.

Now, moving forward, my own personal goal for Splashy this year is to
add GL support. I want to have fire-breathing Penguin shown at boot,
while my system is starting up. And with all the determination that
the community has, I think that will be done before the year is up
(and perhaps even before Etch is released ;-)).

However, we need to meet the needs of the people who would need
Splashy the most (end-users). So, I'd like to get input from as many
desktop/usability oriented people to trace the road map for Splashy
0.2 and 0.3 in the months/year to come. I'd love for you to reply to
this email with ideas to be discussed in a meeting that we will be
holding on IRC soon. You might also use the excellent, Feature Request
form on our project page[1]. And later we will post all this to our
roadmap page on our wiki page[2].

Again, sorry for the cross-posting, but I felt that it just made
things simpler.

Your ideas (and patches and bug reports and social support) are welcome!

[1] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/splashy
[2] http://splashy.alioth.debian.org/wiki

--
----)(-----
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

No .doc: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.es.html