Bye-bye beastie ...

[Graham Bentley]

I think on some early QNX you had a short series
of dots ................ then a static rotating display of

| / --  \ |

characters in that order (I hope you know what I mean)
which showed that the kernel was loading devices etc

However if you presed escape you could get the full output.
This seemed like a good / neat compromise as you could 'see'
that something was happening without all the debug output
(but had the choice of doing so if you wished)

I liked that by the login prompt you still had only (and no more
than) one screeens worth of output.

On Mandrake Linux 9.2 you could choose between a 'nice'
hi rez background with a central window of the kernel text
output in a colour that fitted in with the splash screen, a
fixed full screen splash or the framebuffer console with a
large but faint 9.2 in lite grey in the backround (very cool)

I suppose it depends what you are doing. Most FreeBSD dare
I suggest runs on servers and prolly only gets rebooted once
a year so you never would see the startup screens. However
that doesnt mean that FreeBSD shoudnt get all multimedia
and provide a desktop too.

I find Windogs 'Look over there children, its the mystical
computer lantern doing its magic' splash screens somewhat
annoying and would rather have the low rez kernel OP of
FreeBSD any day !!!