> Well, sparclinux boxes display a nice penguin at startup, but intel pc's
> do not. I think this is not acceptable. Here comes a patch to change this.
>
> This works by changing the vga font (chars 0xc0 - 0xdf, the range where
> these box characters reside) and displaying these chars as 8x4 block. This
> gives a nice penguin in text mode(!). Works only if you have a vga, and if
> the vga font is 16 pixel high.
Hmm... What about having a penguin startup screen run from LILO which does
it's stuff (by looking pretty) before the Linux kernel is loaded off the
disk (by the pengiun loader) a sort of bootstrap to the kernel. After
restoring the screen to 80x25 or whatever.
Nick bits of LILO and bits of Linux kernel source hack them about a bit, bolt
them together add a few video/keyboard routines. Create your
image/pixmaps/animations in one big data block that will link in and
put it in place of /zImage in lilo.conf.
This solution seems to give a nice fullscreen colourful bootups, doesn't
hide kernel error messages, people who don't want to run it don't have to
make the extra effort to edit their lilo.conf and install it, and there is
no kernel bloat.
I have visions of the penguin waddling onto the monitor from the left,
turning to face the user, then putting it's wings (?? is this right)
together, lifting its wings up and out to form a 'Y' gesture (as if to
say "Ta Dah!") with the wording "Linux" above it.
Each kernel season we could have a contest to design the latest bootup
screen. No doubt Linux support companys can also advertise themselves by
designing their own screens.
Maybe a POV (raytraced) scene could be engineered of the penguin, then
the output compressed down into a reasonable size after.
Then if we want to get really clever (but I'd doubt anyone will allow it) is
to do all this in protected mode, load zImage off the disk, boot it (while
the bootscreen code is also somewhere else in VM). But the kernel has some
hooks back into the startup screen to maybe do have a series of animated
icons/text to inform the user what is happening or something. Then just fade
out the pretty screen, zap the virtual memory the bootup code/data used from
memory and assume the position.
-- Darryl Miles