Yes, you need to detect terminal capabilities and then use them appropriately.
Ie, your kernel needs half a meg of termcap built into it, and probably most
of libtermcap also. And this is only for text! Let alone attempting to
display a graphical boot logo!
I doubt Linus would be open to such a waste.
> Here is talk not about case where Linux is running with real terminal attached.
> Less then 1% of Linux boxes are installed this way !!! Talk is about "standard"
> mode -- you have Linux on Desktop computer...
Interesting statistics, where did you gather this information? Because I know
of places where 100% of the linux boxes are used this way. If I take my group
of close friends for example, there are 5 people, 8 linux boxes (and a bunch
of win95 and Macintosh), and in terms of percentages - 50% have no terminal
attached, one has a mono serial terminal and a 21" 1bpp X terminal, one has
(I think) a 2Mb SVGA card but I'm not certain, only the last two are pc
workstations.
> Oops. YES, OF COURSE. If you have non-standard system (for example with
> serial startup console, or embeded system, or ...) you does not want or need
> such Boot Logo. For server without monitor attached this is also useless.
> But this is rare cases anyway (important, yes, but rare).
Funnily enough, this "rare" case constitutes 75% of the computers running
linux in my group of close friends. 75% doesn't sound "rare" to me.
And I'd be quite surprised if we were extra-ordinary linux users.
> > You seem to suggest that a root prompt will freak out the users. But what
> > system administrator in their right mind is going to let their gumby users
> > see a root shell prompt on a daily basis?
> What else prompt he will see after installing RedHat, Debian, Slackware, etc,
> etc. just now ?
The system administrator will see the root prompt, the user won't. My point
still stands valid.
> > I just had this really horrible thought that you're actually considering
> > giving these GUI users root access to their workstations!
> Unfortunatelly you could not even install a lot of stuff without root access :-(
Then either those programs are critical system components (such as sysvinit,
login, X11, etc) in which case the system administrator will be installing
them, or the programs themselves are broken.
There is no reason why an ordinary userspace program cannot be installed by
a regular user unless that program is either broken in design, or system
access policy dictates that ordinary users won't have access to a compiler.
(in the latter case, they could try finding a pre-compiled binary of the
program anyhow and still install it anyway).
> > Come to think of it, the bootup sequence you describe above is actually very
> > bad since important information could scroll up unretrievably into the mini
> > window.
> This is depends from size of screen. If you'll use 376x564 screen and 6x8 font
> this "mini window" will be more in size then current fullscreen view...
Yes, but that assumes there is a console attached that is capable of displaying
that particular resolution. You just cannot blindly assume these things!
Even if this feature could be implemented tidily, you still end up with the
problem of inconsistent bootup sequences across linux boxes. Some will boot
like now, some will have this multiple scrolly window thing in a 376x564 screen,
some will be displaying graphics, some will have abbreviated regular bootup
messages... ugh. And it'll also cause problems logging bootup information
unless dmesg is rewritten to handle each case and output a generic log format.
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