Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

[Dennis Clarke]

A picture says a 1000 words :

    http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/grub/grub_1.91/day_01/img_1280.jpg

I was thinking that perhaps simple line drawing with "-" and "+" could
be used for now and that would also work nicely on serial consoles and
old DEV VT units that some of us still use on headless hardware.  So
perhaps a config option in the grub.cfg for charset would be useful.

Dennis

Re: Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

[Marco Gerards]

Dennis Clarke <blastwave@gmail.com> writes:

> A picture says a 1000 words :
>
>     http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/grub/grub_1.91/day_01/img_1280.jpg
>
> I was thinking that perhaps simple line drawing with "-" and "+" could
> be used for now and that would also work nicely on serial consoles and
> old DEV VT units that some of us still use on headless hardware.  So
> perhaps a config option in the grub.cfg for charset would be useful.

This was on the pegasos, right?  I have a pegasos myself and this is
on my todo list.  It is just that not the correct characters are used
to draw the menu.  I suspect this is a bug in the firmware (IOW: it
does not use ANSI, which IIRC is in the IEEE 1275 spec.), so we need
to come up with a workaround.

--
Marco

Re: Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

[Dennis Clarke]

On 11/2/05, Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl> wrote:
> Dennis Clarke <blastwave@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > A picture says a 1000 words :
> >
> >     http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/grub/grub_1.91/day_01/img_1280.jpg
> >
> > I was thinking that perhaps simple line drawing with "-" and "+" could
> > be used for now and that would also work nicely on serial consoles and
> > old DEV VT units that some of us still use on headless hardware.  So
> > perhaps a config option in the grub.cfg for charset would be useful.
>
> This was on the pegasos, right?

Yes :

  http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/grub/grub_1.91/day_01/img_1275.jpg

> I have a pegasos myself and this is on my todo list.
>  It is just that not the correct characters are used
> to draw the menu.  I suspect this is a bug in the firmware (IOW: it
> does not use ANSI, which IIRC is in the IEEE 1275 spec.), so we need
> to come up with a workaround.

Everything works fine.  Just looks wrong.

Do you know anything about the possibility for support of a background
graphic image also or is that still a major leap with many
ramifications ?

Dennis

Re: Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

[Marco Gerards]

Dennis Clarke <blastwave@gmail.com> writes:

> Do you know anything about the possibility for support of a background
> graphic image also or is that still a major leap with many
> ramifications ?

For that we need to have framebuffer support.  Framebuffer support is
planned for GRUB 2.  After that new features like a background image
can be added.

On the pegasos the firmware does not support a framebuffer.  But I
think if we add an ATI driver, most pegasos users will have a
framebuffer.  If there is a framebuffer the menu borders will always
look nice.

--
Marco

Re: Fix for strange characters in GRUB 1.91

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Nov 2, 2005, at 11:19 AM, Marco Gerards wrote:
>
> On the pegasos the firmware does not support a framebuffer.  But I
> think if we add an ATI driver, most pegasos users will have a
> framebuffer.  If there is a framebuffer the menu borders will always
> look nice.

Pegasos firmware doesn't provide a framebuffer? That is very ungood.

Writing and maintaining our own ATI driver does not sound like fun. We 
would also need a PCI driver (how will you access config space?) and 
infrastructure that is otherwise unneeded, such as memory barriers. And 
*then* we get to talk about initializing and running the video driver 
itself, which as far as I've seen is not a simple task with modern 
graphics hardware...

-Hollis