[IAEP] [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen

[Gary C Martin]

On 30 May 2009, at 19:40, Sebastian Dziallas wrote:

> Gary C Martin wrote:
>> On 30 May 2009, at 18:50, Walter Bender wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Frederick Grose <fgrose at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>> For Sugar, the new "Hello World" tutorial could be its boot
>>>> Activities for
>>>> Learners: Each development tool (Pippy, Turtle Art, Etoys,  
>>>> others, even
>>>> Forth) should provide an Activity to build the start-up sequence.
>>>> Learners
>>>> could play with the tools to build an endless variety of start-up  
>>>> spots,
>>>> modify and preview from a library of saved sequences, learn all  
>>>> sorts of
>>>> things about the system, the different tools, and of course,
>>>> designate one
>>>> sequence to display on the next boot.
>>>
>>> Fred has sparked an idea. What if we replace the dots with activity
>>> icons?
>>
>> Hmmm, activities shown might not be installed and then lead to  
>> confusion
>> (unless you are considering the difficult step of pre-generating boot
>> graphics at shutdown).
>>
>> There's a fine line between cool eye-candy – and there are plenty of
>> cool Sugary lickable animations we could try, activity icons being  
>> one –
>> and boot UI feedback utility :-)
>>
>> Now... If the technical boot stages could be made clear (device/ 
>> keyboard
>> checks, network detection, certain key services, etc) it could be of
>> real use to have some simplified abstract icon for each stage so  
>> you'd
>> have an idea for what really might be going on (or where a boot/ 
>> hardware
>> problem was) – but realistically that's more of a long term UI
>> opportunity**.
>>
>> ** Sebastian: Do you know just where/when each progress update is
>> triggered, and what major boot landmark could be sensible to visually
>> indicate success of?
>
> Sorry, I'm not exactly sure *when* it gets triggered. What I can  
> tell you from looking at the tarball is that there are also other  
> themes, which contain a different number of .png files. For example,  
> there's one, that contains 32 progress and 19 throbber .png files.  
> So I guess plymouth adjusts what gets displayed to the number of  
> images. I suppose there's one event which triggers the change from  
> showing the progress to the throbber files, but I'm not sure, what  
> it is. From my experience, the throbber files are shown rather late  
> in the boot process, shortly before logging in.

Thanks understood, I think getting clever with the progress icons  
indicating real boot events is pushing the boat out a little too far  
just now. I was digging about for plymouth guides or instructions for  
'creatives' and there is almost nothing I could find except a README  
and the source code. A real quick skim gave me the impression that the  
plymouthd daemon does the main work, and then you go lace your  
relevant/desired start-up scripts with plymouth commands letting  
plymouthd know some progress state had passed.

One quick note, I'm on a MacBook Pro here so can only test Soas using  
VirtualBox. I think it's only ever showing the 'text' boot animation  
mode for me (black screen with blue/stripy progress bar at bottom with  
the word Soas at the right end). Just wanted to mention this as it  
means I can't see what you have done with the boot already, and can't  
tinker about and test this for real myself.

> Ray Strode (halfline in #fedora-devel) is one of the developers and  
> has been really helpful with regard to my questions when hacking the  
> logo into plymouth. He might know.

Thanks, will keep that in mind.

Regards,
--Gary

> --Sebastian
>
>> Regards
>> --Gary
>>
>>> -walter
>>>
>>> --
>>> Walter Bender
>>> Sugar Labs
>>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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