Re: Bootscreen

John Bradford
2003-01-28T12:07:57Z

> > It's perfectly possible that somebody might want to make a television
> > set top box out of a standard x86 motherboard and VGA card, and not
> > have anything displayed until X starts, because the television would
> > not accept the standard VGA scanrate, but X can easily re-program that
> > to around 15 Khz.
>
> OK, but in this case you would have problems with BIOS output etc.

Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of having a simple colour bar
generator for when the VGA output wasn't in the valid frequency range,
but your idea is better as long as the custom BIOS was easily
do-able.

> And I question the approach of automatically deciding to hide startup
> output from the user, in any case. I can imagine a set-top box user on the
> phone to the support department saying "it gets to the Starting - Please
> Wait screen, then just hangs", which would then require an engineer visit,
> as opposed to, for example, "it says Obtaining IP Address... then hangs"
> which would give the support techie the opportunity to tell the user to
> check the ethernet cable is plugged in correctly, etc, before resorting to
> sending out an engineer.

I agree, but how many set top boxes are designed like that? I would
prefer verbose output, but it's generally hidden from end users :-(.

John