Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[John Richard Moser]

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Hugo Heden 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.
> 

That's an interesting way of doing it.  I still prefer the non-quiet
messages ("Preparing restricted drivers" "Starting cups printing system"
etc) during the boot process; but having a full debug output at a
key-press--and advertising the keypress--seems interesting.  Especially
if they could get usplash to move the splash image and progress bar up
(based on skinning to tell where these areas are?) and display the
debugging messages below that in an expanded window...

> Hugo Heden
> 

- --
Bring back the Firefox plushy!
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Is_the_Firefox_plush_gone_for_good
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322367
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