Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

[SavageX]

I very much prefer a nice graphical boot. I absolutely don't need vast amounts of scrolling text during a normal non-failing startup. If things go wrong this obviously doesn't apply anymore and the graphical boot should fallback to a spammy output mode.

[maleadt]

I lol'd.
Progress bar gives you absolutely nothing - it's nice when you don't care/don't know what's going when system is booting, but in any other circumstances it's just another annoyance.
Parallelizing boot process isn't problematic - for example OpenRC prepends each line of boot output with name of the corrssponding service, so nothing is lost

And who do we want to make Linux popular too? Unless you want Linux distributions remain to be an underdog in the OS-race, you'd have to improve the user experience, which involves boot splash enhancement. A phrase I read somewhere: "never underestimate the value of shiny".

I agree when you say that a regular linux user, which is already convinced about it's proper value, doesn't need the nice boot screen. Well, then you just need to activate the proper Plymout plugin so you can see all boot messages scrolling over your screen, in high-resolution! So as a user who prefers to see all boot messages, I'm happy to see this (KMS+Plymouth) getting developed and integrated.

[Vadi]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

Facebrowser delay on the other hand is dissapointing.

[elanthis]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

The proper attitude here would be "I'm not in favor of NVIDIA's drivers because they don't integrate with the Linux graphics stack."

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary. Right now, the driver requires the X DDX driver to work at all -- if the X DDX drivers disappear entirely, that would of course make the NVIDIA driver unusable, which isn't something NVIDIA is going to want. They really do need their drivers to work on Linux because of a wide range of high-end customers that demand support, and those customers are going to end up on more modern Linux installations eventually.

[val-gaav]

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary.

AFAIK they would have to open source their driver to support KMS

[maleadt]

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary.

Can they? I just read:

The last time I talked to the developers working on it, they told me that the hooks necessary to implement kernel modesetting were exported to GPL modules only, and therefore are not usable by the NVIDIA driver.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122845

[Peter_Cordes]

Phoronix: Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

Late last month we shared that Plymouth may replace USplash in Ubuntu and that this matter was to be discussed further at the Jaunty UDS.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjkzNQ

If you don't like your screen flickering when you boot, just remove "quiet" and "splash" from the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, and run update-grub to re-generate the menu entries. Then you'll boot in text mode without any graphical messing around (until X starts, if you have that happen by default).

The only good idea I've seen here was using Plymouth as a way to display the boot messages more nicely. If there was a big progress bar overlaid on them, I wouldn't have a problem with that.

BTW, if you don't know what all your boot messages are about, then maybe that's because modern GNU/Linux starts so much stuff at bootup that it's harder to get started reading up on what does what on your system. In the old days, before initramfs, before devfs, before network-manager, things were simpler. When I started using GNU/Linux (> 10 years ago), there weren't so many messages, and I was fascinated by how the system worked, so I read most of them. Pretty soon I understood what they all were. As new versions of distros introduced new messages, I only had a few new messages to find out about by looking in /etc/init.d or kernel docs to see what made them.... So the boot messages make a pretty good progress bar for me, since I know what happens when my system boots. I've often seen warnings or problems in my boot messages (and I sometimes remember to fix whatever it was in /etc by the time I get to a shell... other boot messages distract me.)

Ok, if you just want to use GNU/Linux, you don't have to read/understand your boot messages. But if you want to be able to fix problems, it _really_ helps to know how your system works. I'm strongly opposed to the trend of hiding boot messages, and stuff like that. Showing the messages seems like a good way for potential new hackers to see that there is a whole layer of Unix waiting under that shiny desktop to catch their interest.

So I'm in favour of text boot messages overlayed with a progress bar as the default setup for Ubuntu. (and other distros, if they currently default to something worse like Ubuntu's current usplash progress bar).

[elanthis]

Can they? I just read:

Well, sucks to be stuck with the NVIDIA driver then, I guess. :/

Hopefully either Nouveau is finally up to snuff by then or NVIDIA sees the light. Between Intel, AMD, and Via, pretty much every other common graphics hardware either already has or soon will have fully Open Source drivers.

Nobody working on the graphics stack gives a damn about NVIDIA's driver. Quite a few of the folks involved actively want NVIDIA's driver (as well as ATI's binary driver) to drop dead. That's the facts, whether or not you agree with the sentiments.

I personally don't blame them. If we worry about what NVIDIA's driver supports, then that means that we are permanently stuck with whatever developments NVIDIA feels like putting money in to and nothing more. That's not even remotely a good place to be. (Freely replace "NVIDIA" in this paragraph with "any big corporation".)

[Vadi]

I seriously doubt any worthy distro would drop support for whatever technologies nvidia needs.

Some people actually do use high-end hardware under linux. surprise, surprise.

[elanthis]

I seriously doubt any worthy distro would drop support for whatever technologies nvidia needs.

Some people actually do use high-end hardware under linux. surprise, surprise.

Nonsense. Both Fedora and Ubuntu very regularly make releases that completely fail to support the NVIDIA driver for weeks (months, a few times), and it is absolutely NOT the fault of the distro. If X changes its driver ABI or the kernel makes an API change, neither of those distros hold back updates waiting for NVIDIA. They release, and NVIDIA users sit with their thumbs up their rear ends waiting for NVIDIA to update their driver. Same with ATI's fglrx. Most other distros do the same.

Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu (nor most other popular distros) target users who need their high-end Quadro/FireGL/whatever cards to work, and Linux as a whole does not target gamers. Again, doesn't matter if you agree or not with the decisions, those are the facts.

The only way that is EVER going to change is if NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel start releasing top-notch Open Source drivers or if the Linux graphics stack comes to an absolute stand-still.