The Ubuntu/Linux startup scroll (was Re: Will install CD and Live CD be merged in the future?)

[Brian Burger]

On 3/22/06, Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 22 March 2006 05:53, Brian Burger wrote:
> > This has been something I've been kicking around ever since I
> > switched from XP to Ubuntu almost a year ago - I'd love to see an
> > English (mostly) explanation of all that stuff that scrolls past
> > when Ubuntu launches.


>Are you asking about the pages and pages of stuff that scrolls by
>initially, or the one-liners that tend to have "[ OK ]" printed on
>the rhs?

The brown one-liners.

>The latter is the start-up scripts running, more easily explainable,
>but still highly dependent on exactly what is installed on the
>machine. For it to make any sense, you first have to understand what
>the service is that is outputting the messages.
>
>So I fear a wiki page like this will be a huge collection of links to
>other stuff and not really of much use to the average user after all.

Even stuff like explaining some of the acronyms might help, I'd think. (LVM,
EVMS, npt - they come thick and fast during startup, but the basics can be
explained in a couple of lines per entry)

The startup scroll is (obviously) one of the first things a Ubuntu user
sees, and as has been said, it's fairly opaque and a lot of the
scary-looking warnings don't actually mean all that much. (like the
ntp.ubuntu.com failure I got when I started up this evening, for example.)

I was looking at the Dapper Flight5 usplash shutdown animation at
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight5 (
http://www.ubuntu.com/include/testing/flight5/usplash-shut-down-movie.gif)
- an animated gif of a fairly standard startup scroll would be a good
starting place for a page like this.

It wouldn't have to be in-depth, but it might give a few people an, "Ah-ha,
so *that's* what <foo> means and that's why it's included like that."
moment...

Anyway, this isn't an idea that I've got the Linux knowlege to pull off now
- but if someone else wants to start it off, I'll do what I can to help.

Brian
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