Re: boot process [SHORT]

Rik van Riel (H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl)
Fri, 15 May 1998 01:03:32 +0200 (MET DST)

On Thu, 14 May 1998, Pierre Phaneuf wrote:
> Etienne Lorrain wrote:
>
> > 2) User of Linux may not like boot messages.
> > Yes, mostly because they will not understand
> > them, because they do not speak enought english.
>
> This is more a question of jargon I think: IRQ, CPU, SMP, DMA, APIC and
> so on, can be confusing, particularly at little error messages that
> aren't critical, like some autodetection routine announcing failures
> (which unless you are lucky, are bound to happen all the time). "My Foo
> device detection FAILED!!! HELP ME!!!!"

This can be solved by simply making the messages less agressive.
"Hmm, there's no Ethernet card on 0x390..."
is a lot more friendly than:
"Probing for Ethernet card on 0x390: Not found!"

And for the real geeks, we can prepend a 6-letter sign
in front of every probe:

SERIAL: "OK, found 2 serial ports (0xiop,irq;0xiop,irq)"

Where the 'SERIAL:' is printed before the probe and the
rest after. A lot of OKs and Hmms could make the kernel
a lot more humanoid&friendly, and thus less frightening.

The programmer-types, OTOH, don't really need MS-like
messages. Most of them (us) would probably prefer the
cuddly messages too :-)

Rik.
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