<span class="gmail_quote">On 3/22/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Alan McKinnon</b> <<a href="mailto:alan@linuxholdings.co.za">alan@linuxholdings.co.za</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
On Wednesday 22 March 2006 05:53, Brian Burger wrote:<br>> This has been something I've been kicking around ever since I<br>> switched from XP to Ubuntu almost a year ago - I'd love to see an<br>> English (mostly) explanation of all that stuff that scrolls past
<br>> when Ubuntu launches.</blockquote><div><br>>Are you asking about the pages and pages of stuff that scrolls by<br>>initially, or the one-liners that tend to have "[ OK ]" printed on<br>>the rhs?
</div><div><br>The brown one-liners. <br><br>>The latter is the start-up scripts running, more easily explainable,<br>>but still highly dependent on exactly what is installed on the<br>>machine. For it to make any sense, you first have to understand what
<br>>the service is that is outputting the messages.<br>><br>>So I fear a wiki page like this will be a huge collection of links to<br>>other stuff and not really of much use to the average user after all.<br>
<br></div>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)<br><br>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
<a href="http://ntp.ubuntu.com">ntp.ubuntu.com</a> failure I got when I started up this evening, for example.)<br><br>I was looking at the Dapper Flight5 usplash shutdown animation at <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight5">
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight5</a> (<a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/include/testing/flight5/usplash-shut-down-movie.gif">http://www.ubuntu.com/include/testing/flight5/usplash-shut-down-movie.gif</a>) - an animated gif of a fairly standard startup scroll would be a good starting place for a page like this.
<br><br>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...<br> <br>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.
<br><br>Brian<br>