02 Feb 2006 01:07 Subscribe

Getting in touch with bootsplashing

I just wanted to play around with the bootsplash a little bit, but it consts me several hours. At first, the documentation is completely outdated, thus RTFM didn't help much. Someone knows more recent documentation (not the READMEs, they are the same)? Please drop me a note and I will slap the bootsplash.org webmaster for not pointing to it ;-) Google? Maybe I unlearned " to google" in the right way, but there is not much either. Installing a new bootsplash is steight forward. Simply copy a new theme below /etc/bootsplash/themes and recreate your initrd to use it. Getting the "verbose splash" while the system is up is also easy: ` splash /etc/bootsplash/themes//config/bootsplash-.cfg ` But I nearly dispaired of getting the "silent splash". When looking at several websites, the splash utility is used in many different ways. At first it came to my mind that the "splash -s" or "splash -S" could mean silent, but who knows? No manpage, no "–help" output. Sorry, but this piece of software is a horror. I saw another one while digging around the web and maybe should have used that one. Ok, back to getting into silent splash mode. After looking at various rc scripts, I came across /etc/rc.splash which finally had the solution. The SuSE bootsplash theme contains some lines as follows: ` trigger silent play anim trigger "rlchange B" play text system trigger "rlchange 3" play text devices trigger "rlchange 5" play text devices trigger "rlreached 5" toverbose trigger "YaST running" stopanim anim trigger "rlreached 0" tosilent ` Seems that this is related to my aim. On action "rlchange 0" for example, goto silent mode (tosilent). But how to trigger this trigger? Ahh, there is an option '-t' to give to the splash binary. Everything I read said something about "this is the text to display". That might be true if you have a textbox in your bootsplash, and have defined triggers to change the text, but this is generally speaking simply wrong. The option '-t' just triggers specific actions and has nothing to do with text. No documentation states that. Bullshit! So all you need to go to silent mode is to do a ` splash -t "rlreached 0" /etc/bootsplash/themes//config/bootsplash-.cfg ` provided that you have a line like this in your config file: `trigger "rlreached 0" tosilent` Wouldn't it be better to have something like this: `trigger "silent" tosilent` A 'splash -t "silent"' would be more intuitive IMHO. But this is personal taste. Last but not least, I have one more. Don't forget to put a newline at the end of your config file, else you will wonder for a long time why it doesn't work as expected although you thought that you had understand this whole thing. As a conclusion, IMO I think all this bootspash monster is a good example how software should not be done. At least i learned that ;-) Happy splashing, Holger

 


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