Updated "Minimalistic", patching usplash, sources

[Frank Schoep]

On Sunday 14 May 2006 11:00, Ante Karamatić wrote:
> With widescreen monitor, black background makes sense. Actually,
> anything else doesn't make sense. Any non-black-background usplash looks
> very ugly on widescreen without streching. And streched usplash looks
> even worse.
>
> Untill usplash starts supporting widescreen, I wouldn't like to see any
> non-black usplashes in Ubuntu.

Up until now I've only had complaints about people with widescreen monitors 
which _do_ give tan across the whole screen so my black corners didn't match.

VMware is one of the few scenarios I've seen where a tan island on black is 
shown (because it doesn't emulate palette 0 colors) and to be honest, I think 
it really doesn't matter. Even with that black border and hard tan corners, I 
think the splash is more Ubuntu and polished than anything black.

Honestly, if "tan island" is the only problem left I'm now officially going to 
give up and say I can indeed not solve that problem for Dapper. I'll let high 
up decide what to do.

There's also a lot of complaints about not being able to visually change the 
splash at this point in the release cycle. I think that is a bad argument, 
because no real end-user has seen anything yet of the Dapper release and we 
are able to change it without major regressions and translation work.

To clarify what I mean: I hear no end users complaining that the splash for 
Redmond XP changed on the last day before going gold, where Bill Gates 
himself had hired an external artist to provide alternative artwork [1]. 
There's also no single Mac user arguing that the early Tiger bootup screen 
was looking different two weeks before going gold [2].

Dapper is going to be a one-shot big bang moment this year. We might as well 
make the most of it now that the whole world is looking at us.

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep




[1], [2] - completely made up, if you're looking here I hope my point is clear