Usplash project

[Vincenzo Ampolo]

Hi to all.
Excuse me for my post "Re: USplash's status?" that i done by the forum
(not email) some hours ago, it was not referred to Hoary but to usplash
code itself (excuse me mdz).

BTW, from November 04 i'm working for a bootsplash to debian based
distros, in the beginning i worked on fbsplash (gentoo gensplash) to
make it available for debian, on December 04 i met Paul Sladen (the guy
that was working on usplash) and on Jan 05 i switched to ubuntu and i
asked for code about usplash to Sladen.
Sladen said that there were not any sources about usplash, just a
proof-of-concept package that you can see at
http://81.113.230.186/kalatlug/phpwiki/index.php/UsplashTarball .
By this pakage and many specifications i studied how framebuffer works
and how to make a 100% user mode splash boot screen.
So i went to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/USplash  and started to
develop something, but while i was developing i discover that it was not
the best approach since that way to solve the "bootsplash problem" was
too huge for me... 
So i redraw the stuff. Using c++ i treat images and fbx devices as
objects and thanks to util functions i can modify the image objects and
paint them directly into fbx as easy BMP images.
At the end of Feb the main stuff was finished: it was capable of paint a
image (that is scaled for the framebuffer resolution) and then draw a
bar. The bar is upgraded by reading /dev/vcs1 and finding sensible
services (such as udev, hotplug, and so on). Now it is going to be
relased the alpha2 package that solve a big hole of the previous
version(the framebuffer was not set at boot time and it resulted a non
boatable pc).

What i propose here is to develop this "usermode splash" as usplash
itself since it seems to use less resources than the approach described
at the Usplash wiki page.

For more specifications please see
http://81.113.230.186/kalatlug/phpwiki/index.php/UsplashHowDoesItWork