Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Liam Proven]

On 06/10/2007, Hugo Heden <hugoheden at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/6/07, John Richard Moser <nigelenki at comcast.net> wrote:
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> >
> > I brought this up when this first happened, now I'll bring it up again
> > and see what people think after a few releases.
> >
> > The boot screen in Ubuntu has used a model where it displays an image
> > and a progress bar for a while now.  Knocking off "quiet" in the boot
> > line changes this behavior to include a running log of what's going on
> > (loading drivers, starting ssh, bringing up GDM...).  The reason I was
> > given for the default "quiet" mode was that the system seemed "More
> > polished" this way; although I've seen someone argue that specifically
> > having Grub flash a cryptic message for 1/2 a second about something
> > "startles and scares the user," and only reference the rest of the boot
> > sequence by proxy (I guess words in general scare users).
> >
> > Personally I think it's "more polished" to see what the system is doing.
> >  To be specific, when my system boots it's doing exactly one thing:
> > BOOTING.  It takes it 30 seconds or more to do only that, which is
> > inexcusable.  Now, with "quiet" knocked off my system is doing a number
> > of things and it seems reasonable that it might take it a little time.
> > An unpolished system will either give zero feedback, or will feed me
> > lines of cryptic status codes (loading <long_path>/driver.ko into
> > <memory address> etc for each driver?).
> >
> > What's the overall experience of the user community been on this?  It's
> > obviously a trivial detail but it was important enough for the specific
> > change in the first place right?
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> Disclaimer: Regular non-techie user here.
>
> I used SUSE 9.3 some years ago, and they had a nice balance: A splash
> screen displaying a logo (just like Ubuntu is doing now) *but* with a
> little label in the upper left corner saying "Press Esc to see boot
> progress messages". If I recall correctly.
>
> When pressing Esc, the boot messages were displayed, but not in the
> "raw console" graphical style as in a console (you know, Ctrl-Alt-F1),
> but in  a nice spashy and colored style, still using the
> "Ctrl-Alt-F7-console".
>
> They messages displayed were the regular cryptical ones -- this was
> not polished or adapted in any way.
>
> I liked that -- it gave a *more* polished impression, while giving the
> user the option to see what was going on and perhaps to educate
> herself some degree in the process.
>
> The current Ubuntu way is ok, but I would prefer the SUSE way.
>
> Also, if I understand correctly (which is highly unlikely though),
> there seem to be a couple of technical issues with the current Ubuntu
> way:
>
> 1) If I want to see the boot messages, I press Ctrl-Alt-F1, but then I
> can not get the splash-screen back by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7. That gives
> an unpolished impression.
>
> 2) When in the Ctrl-Alt-F1 console, I can/have to press Ctrl-Alt-F8 to
> see *further* boot messages. This may be expected behaviour but feels
> a little weird.
>
> 3) When in the Ctrl-Alt-F1- or F8-console, rather late in the boot
> process (when gdm is started?) the console is switched over to
> Ctrl-Alt-F7 to display the login screen. This may be expected
> behaviour but feels a little weird. (One could argue that if the user
> has chosen a console, then the system should stay with that console.)
> (This might be a work-around for (1)?)

Nothing much to say other than I entirely agree. Especially at 5am
this morning when I was trying to find the right combination of GRUB
tweaks to turn off QUIET and disable the splash screen.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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