A Closer Look At Red Hat's Plymouth

[Yfrwlf]

Well I'm for one that is not thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I prefer to watch the verbose boot up processes watching for unexpected issues that these splash screens cover up. Hell I disable the startup splash on OS X too.

Sure, and that should always be available for users who want it, I love the ability to hit ESC and see it all, though if there ARE errors the graphical mode should show you those any way, like elanthis said.

[Yfrwlf]

Yfrwlf, I think you failed to read the whole article.

It's pretty clear that you can NOT just install Plymouth into a distro and actually have it work. It needs tight integration with the distro to actually work. It needs to properly inserted into the initrd (which will require an entirely different set of commands and scripts than Fedora uses) and the init system needs updates to communicate with Plymouth properly. Plus I'd imagine you'd need to change the GDM startup to use the new features to not reset the video mode and get smooth fade-in.

If Ubuntu/Debian/SUSE/etc. want Plymouth, the distro engineers are going to have to integrate it, which will take a fair amount of effort.

It is not at all something a regular user -- or even a moderately advanced user -- would be expected to know how to do properly.

Then it's a failure of a project so far for end users. Using package dependencies, you CAN install the required software in any Linux distro, it's completely possible, they just haven't done it yet so I hope they will. Shame on Red Hat for making software which is difficult for anyone to install and use but if it's "still in alpha" then fine. Regardless, that is not the way you gain community support when the Linux community can't get easy access to your software, so if they want more developers and more bug reporters and such to come in and help with this Plymoth project, they need to get things together and organized so you don't have to be a programmer to use the damn code.

Again, if it's still just "alpha-grade" software, I can give them a break, but they're only hurting themselves and the development process by making their software difficult to use and experiment with.

Previews of upcoming software is nice and all, but it's much nicer if us Linux users can actually have access to it so we can try it for ourselves. Duh. I'm not saying anything that isn't completely obvious. I hope Plymoth will be available for Linux users to try in the future. Fxxx exclusive distro lock-in.

[elanthis]

Well I'm for one that is not thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I prefer to watch the verbose boot up processes watching for unexpected issues that these splash screens cover up. Hell I disable the startup splash on OS X too.

Congratulations -- you're a statistical anomaly.

The neat thing about Plymouth is that you should still get those messages. With RHGB I recall that if an error occurred, it immediately switched to the details mode that showed the console output. I believe with Plymouth it will show you all errors once GDM starts inside of a log window.

[fat_chris]

Question for Airlied:
I have been try to get KMS working on another distro (gentoo) but have so far been unsuccessful.
I've got the kernel from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git (drm-rawhide branch) built it with modesetting on by default all built fine, libdrm from git://git.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm.git (modesetting-gem branch) and xf86-video-ati from git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/xf86-video-ati (branch radeon-gem-cs). When I boot without nomodeset it will get to openrc and then load the modules where I get a blank screen and a no signal message on the screen. In the logs it pretty much just says that it can't find anything connected to the graphics card (r580 x1900 xt) and it says the drivers loaded fine. I also tried building drm and radeon into the kernel but the same happens just much earlier in the boot process.
Is there anything else I need to do/enable/install?
Any help is appreciated

[deanjo]

It would also be nice to see Plymouth (or some adaptation of it) supported by other Linux distributions.

Supported? It's open source, just install it in Ubuntu if you want it in Ubuntu. So what if it doesn't come with it by default. I guess that's one reason for rolling your own distro, but yeah I hope most desktop Linuxes will come with this software in the future because most users will want it I reckon.

Linux needed a boot process sleek enough to match Mac's. I hope the next step will be to implement this in the Linux BIOS as well, so that it will be possible to go from power on all the way to your desktop with no flickering or changing of resolutions whatsoever.

Well I'm for one that is not thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I prefer to watch the verbose boot up processes watching for unexpected issues that these splash screens cover up. Hell I disable the startup splash on OS X too.

[elanthis]

Yfrwlf, I think you failed to read the whole article.

It's pretty clear that you can NOT just install Plymouth into a distro and actually have it work. It needs tight integration with the distro to actually work. It needs to properly inserted into the initrd (which will require an entirely different set of commands and scripts than Fedora uses) and the init system needs updates to communicate with Plymouth properly. Plus I'd imagine you'd need to change the GDM startup to use the new features to not reset the video mode and get smooth fade-in.

If Ubuntu/Debian/SUSE/etc. want Plymouth, the distro engineers are going to have to integrate it, which will take a fair amount of effort.

It is not at all something a regular user -- or even a moderately advanced user -- would be expected to know how to do properly.

[Yfrwlf]

It would also be nice to see Plymouth (or some adaptation of it) supported by other Linux distributions.

Supported? It's open source, just install it in Ubuntu if you want it in Ubuntu. So what if it doesn't come with it by default. I guess that's one reason for rolling your own distro, but yeah I hope most desktop Linuxes will come with this software in the future because most users will want it I reckon.

Linux needed a boot process sleek enough to match Mac's. I hope the next step will be to implement this in the Linux BIOS as well, so that it will be possible to go from power on all the way to your desktop with no flickering or changing of resolutions whatsoever.

[gQuigs]

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV250 [Mobility FireGL 9000] (rev 02)

It's in a laptop if that matters. Tried many of the combinations of radeon.agpmode=-1/1/2/4/8 with and without radeon.modeset=1.

Didn't matter what radeon.agpmode was set to.

I suppose since this is unsupported a bug report wouldn't be an option.
The Xorg.0.log looks really weird to me...why is vesa in there?(although I haven't ever seen an Xorg log from a KMS system before.)

It is available here (http://gquigs.googlepages.com/Xorg.0.log) if interested.

Do you have (good) 3d on your rv280?

[airlied]

airlied: thanks! X won't actually start when using KMS, so yea.. not ready for prime time. But it's still cool to watch the solar bootup :P

Wierd X should start whats the card? AGP rv250?

it works on my AGP rv280 here.

You can also try adding radeon.agpmode=
options
with -1 == PCI mode, 1,2,4,8 for various agp modes.

[gQuigs]

airlied: thanks! X won't actually start when using KMS, so yea.. not ready for prime time. But it's still cool to watch the solar bootup :P

zombiepig: AFAIK r300 - r500 should be supported