Fedora 8 Boot Process

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Brian Tate escribió:
> I was reading the feature list for Fedora 8 and was disappointed when 
> I came across the "Better Startup Experience".
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup
>
> After reading the "Plan for improvement" section, I find it 
> discomforting such a major change will be done to the existing very 
> working/stable rhgb boot process.
>
> 1) Do away with the grub menu by default
>    Why? That is the first question that came to mind. A large number 
> of linux users dual-boot multiple OSes. It also is useful when you 
> have multiple kernel versions installed; if you set the time-out to 3 
> seconds do you really notice it?

I couldn't agree more with you on this... However...
> 2) Switch to graphical Mode in initrd, draw an animation....
>    I have an animation now in rhgb, and as a bonus I can see all my 
> services loading if I hit the "more" button. I trust this feature will 
> not go away?

Ever heard of Linux BootSplash? Is way better than RHGB in that 
BootSplash (upon which I'm assuming they're basing this) does not 
require to launch an early Xserver (in other words, it consumes quite a 
bit of resources to do that and can't be done as soon as the kernel is 
loaded, where as BootSplash can, as it is part of the kernel image).
> 3) rhgb goes away
>    ?reinvent the wheel?

Nope, improve upon it. RHGB was regarded by many back in the days of 
Fedora Core 2 as the worst idea for a graphical boot for Linux, as the 
Linux console already supported high resolution framebuffer images... 
Just out of curiosity, try passing the kernel the argument "vga=792" 
(without the quotes) on your next boot and see what happens ;-). Work on 
projects such BootSplash started even back in the days of Red Hat 9, but 
never got really stable. Some projects started to use it (Slackware, 
SuSE, Gentoo, etc). BootSplash had a function which could represent two 
modes, pretty much the same as what you see happens within RHGB right 
now. By means of pressing F12 you can see the boot process just like 
before, and it is even possible to switch to it if a problem occurs 
during boot up (a service taking too long to load, a service failing to 
start, a hard disk check, etc). This was the way to go from the 
beginning, I was actually surprised that RHGB lingered for so long!
>
> This sounds a lot like the useless Mac OS X boot sequence in which a 
> little circle is animated in the middle of the screen. That tells the 
> user nothing what is going on in the boot process and is a pile of 
> crap. Almost as brilliant as the Windows Vista loading screen.
>
> I'd be curious to hear others thoughts on this; I can't be the only 
> user out there who likes to know his system is indeed booting up and 
> what it is doing. Is this really the direction we want for the 
> fedora-desktop environment? Simply cloning other OSes poor user 
> interface decisions?
>
>