Make the init-process look like the StarWars Credits

Hi,

I was wondering if there is a way to make the boot-process look StarWars-like:

lalallaal
llalalallalalalalalalalalala
lalalalalalalaalallalalalalalalalallala

and let it scroll up the screen. I would think that this could be done with the Framebuffer-Device. Maybe something like fblogo or so.

Thanks,
Niels

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

if your processor is so fast that it gets bored waiting for your disk, that could be cool ;)

http://www.bootsplash.org has the utils for full-screen fb logo and other stuff, i.e. fbmngplay and fbtruetype, playback mng anims and drop text in any size/color/position on the screen in a TrueType font. mix that together with some nice bilinear filtering and you'd have the beginning of a jaw-dropping misuse of CPU :)

so in other words, without examining the practicality, yes. the fb can do that if the kernel console that gets rendered to the fb can be piped thru a gimpy pre-processor. sounds like fun. maybe one could even borrow the code from the starwars XScreenSaver to do the pretty rendering, since it already takes plaintext input.

Rob Couto
[email protected]
Rules for computing success:
1) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
2) Ease of use is no substitute for power.
3) Safety matters; use a static-free hammer.
--

oops, uhm, i forgot the X in XScreenSaver. you'd have to bring your own drawing routines, never mind that someone made X do it already...

Rob Couto
[email protected]
Rules for computing success:
1) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
2) Ease of use is no substitute for power.
3) Safety matters; use a static-free hammer.
--

I suppose it would be possible to use 3D features of the graphics chip. It would require a rather massive hacking in the fb driver, of course.

Måns Rullgård
[email protected]

massive hacking? hehe, yea. geniuses, please stop me when I stop making sense...

AFAICT, that would be both excellent and terrible at the same time. using hw accel makes the process lighter on CPU and looks great but ridiculously intense on the coder... i mean, who could you recruit to take X11 vid drivers and mutate them into kernel code? you'd need 3D code that belongs to Mesa, DRI code that belongs to whatever X module and the matching kernel module, possibly agpgart, and so on. by the time it's 3D, you aren't using the framebuffer code, you've taken the GUI and moved it into the kernel --- hello Win32. That's if you did it smart and made it modular enough to have other purposes, i.e. X11 overdrive... then X needs to know about it, or at least the DRI module involved, and then it's either they trip over one another or X gets cut down to just the libs and network activity. then maybe the kernel begins with X which starts your xterms fullscreen on vt1-6. all the time it's faster and loads sooner. and along with it, you get the legendary stability of a MS slop'erating system. to have that much for one brief piece of eyecandy is a little silly. and when the booting's done, is vt1 still zooming out into space? will I be able to see the top few lines of 'top'?

the nice thing about fbmngplay is that it can easily be told to stop ;) why not simply make the console a file or fifo, then "tail -f <file> | text_render_app -d /dev/fb0" as soon as init can fire it off?

there seems to be a mailing list at bootsplash.org, maybe we should be there instead.

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bootsplash-discussion

Rob Couto
[email protected]
Rules for computing success:
1) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
2) Ease of use is no substitute for power.
3) Safety matters; use a static-free hammer.
--

I think you're overcomplicating the issue. You certainly don't need any 3D code to get a star-wars like scroll going. You can make a 2D transform to make the fonts _look_ like they're scrolling out into space. As a matter of fact, wouldn't simply transforming the rectangular viewport into a trapezoid do the trick? You could then frame this with a starry bitmap, or whatever.

This doesn't sound like it would require any massive hacking (although I'll readily confess that I haven't looked into the code.)

Javier Fernandez-Ivern

i know, i'm a pessimist seeing things way too negatively. not trying to knock a guy senseless for his 3d suggestion, i just got carried away. sorry...

of course you wouldn't _need_ actual 3D code, so you can leave mesa out. it's just the issue of HW accel vs. software making things really hard to do without engineering a new DRI-like fb, it seems. and that new fb has other (ab)uses... one thing leads to another.

and what youre describing... that's quite like the hacked fb fullscreen splash code i'm suggesting. but i'm not realizing that a little code can draw a lot of things. thus it probably _could_ all fit in the kernel (except gfx) and run instantly (but only unitl init is through booting to the default runlevel, i hope?)

Rob Couto
[email protected]
Rules for computing success:
1) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
2) Ease of use is no substitute for power.
3) Safety matters; use a static-free hammer.
--