[ubuntu-art] Updated "Minimalistic", patching usplash, sources

[Frank Schoep]

Hello ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-art,

Let me first apologize for cross-posting this, but the discussion about a new 
usplash is now officially going on in countless of places and I feel that 
what I'm going to tell you is both relevant to -art and -devel at the same 
time. I won't make a habit of doing this so please excuse me for once.

The part more interesting for ubuntu-art is above the line, ubuntu-devel 
subscribers will find the part under the line more interesting.

First of all, many thanks to all testers for testing the Minimalastic usplash. 
Everyone who reported it worked well on their system, thanks again, but I'm 
sorry this mail is not going to be about you, it's the problems that I'm 
going to tackle.

I've gotten some replies indicating that laptops and certain TFTs do not scale 
the logo, which was expected. But instead of showing a black area around the 
screen, they fill it with palette color 0, which is tan in my case. So, 
instead of the rounded corners looking good, they look bad. It seems that 
VMware is more of an exception than a rule in this case.

So, after resizing and polishing the logo and it's position tonight I also 
removed the black corners to see if any more complaints stream in about them 
being removed. If testing is indicative, the largest (only?) portion of the 
userbase doesn't need them. I will personally assist users who have black 
backgrounds behind an unscaled usplash and complain about it. Honestly.

The updated version is available at the exact same URL, the version number is 
the same so you _will_ have to remove the current version if you have it 
installed. This was just to make sure I don't have two versions in the wild. 
So the URL is still:
http://www.ffnn.nl/media/external/ubuntu/usplash/usplash-minimalistic_0.1.deb

Screenshots of the old version are still here:
http://www.ffnn.nl/media/external/ubuntu/usplash/minimalistic-working-full.jpg
http://www.ffnn.nl/media/external/ubuntu/usplash/minimalistic-working-squashed.jpg

Some users asked why there was no text. The reason is simple: after powering 
on my machine I do not expect it to do anything other than getting me to the 
desktop as fast as possible. Am I alone in this line of thinking? I think 
"less is more" fits the bill quite well here.

I've also thought about making Kubuntu and Edubuntu usplashes similar to this 
one. I think they'll work out great, with Kubuntu having two shades of blue 
and Edubuntu leaning towards the yellow or orange. But let's first get Ubuntu 
main on the tracks.

That was the ubuntu-art part. Now let's move to ubuntu-devel.

========================================

I want / need to patch usplash to be able to cut down it's current verbosity 
and to still be able to display error messages. I've gotten some reactions 
that Minimalastic currently only shows "FAIL" but not what has failed. That 
is correct, because I set both the text foreground and background to the same 
tan to simulate hiding all text except "FAIL". How can I obtain usplash's 
source to make a patch?

I'll elaborate on what I want to do:

Right now, usplash probably does this:
- read input
- receive description of boot-part (e.g. "Starting Apache webserver")
- display description on the left
- read input
- receive result (e.g. "OK")
- display result on the right

What I want in the new scenario is this:
- receive description of boot-part
- store description in memory
- receive result
- if result "OK", don't display anything
- if result "FAIL", display both description and result

That's all. I'm sure I would be able to patch usplash in a matter of minutes 
to do this and it would solve my main problem for the usplash. As you might 
see, I'm really eager to get this done because it will make boot up feel that 
more polished. Removing the drawing operations of "non-interesting" text will 
also speed up boot times (especially noticeable on VMware and several 
videocards, for instance the one I have, a nVidia Geforce 7800 GS).

The change I'm proposing will work for all usplash themes and make any usplash 
less confusing. It will also help to focus attention more on what actually 
goes wrong, like a main Unix philosophy it seems. How do you all feel about 
this?

Oh, one more thing: the sources for the usplash are available on my CVS server 
via a CVSWeb interface, you can download tarballs and browse commit logs with 
it if you like: http://cvs.ffnn.nl/

I hope we can work together in bringing the best end-user bootup experience 
along with Dapper. Thanks for reading and testing!

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep