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Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 12:41:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
cc: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>,
        Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, brandon@glacier.cold.org,
        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: splash-page on bootup.. 
In-Reply-To: <199609221650.KAA07455@rover.village.org>
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On Sun, 22 Sep 1996, Warner Losh wrote:

> In message <199609221457.JAA14843@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Joe Greco writes:
> : If you have the appropriate graphics depth available, _maybe_... can't
> : remember enough about PC graphics to figure out if normal VGA is 16 or 256
> : colors..  16 obviously would not fly.
> 
> Hmmm, I think that turning the background blue or some other pleasing
> color would go a long way toward making people like the boot process
> more. :-) :-)

> Maybe the best idea would be to have a -q mode that boots quietly so
> that you can do the blue screen trick, and then a little later start
> up X windows and see very little in the way of booting junk.  After
> all, what NT does it turn the screen blue, print a terse message that
> says it is coming up, then starts Windows as soon as it is able, and
> then continues bringing up the rest of the system.  I seem to recall
> that one of its loader stages does this.

I think this is the best idea yet!  Turn the background blue, the
foreground white, and draw a few cheezy curses-looking boxes and a status
bar.  If you notice, both FreeBSD and Slackware Linux's SETUP programs
have this look, as does the MS-DOS SETUP program.  :-)

Then recode the probe messages to print in the appropriate part of the
screen, bump the status bar up at various stages of the boot process, and
voila!  A "professional" boot sequence.  Especially if OEM's can customize
the various messages and colors to give their version a unique look.

-- Jake