why is it called /boot/beastie.4th ?

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> writes:
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> writes:
> > Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> writes:
> > > http://www.secnetix.de/olli/tmp/vloader.png
> > This is brilliant!  Send patches!  :)
> Does that mean you're volunteering to be my mentor?  :)

It means, at the very least, that I have worked on similar code in the
kernel (not loader) before, and that I therefore feel competent to at
least look over your code.

Considering your track record, I'm surprised you haven't found someone
to mentor you already.  I still remember using QPEG / QPV many years
ago; if you agree not to ask me what I used it for, I'll agree not to
ask you what you wrote it for :P

> BTW, my patches add a few FICL words (forth commands) to the loader
> (i386 and amd64 only).  They implement simple graphics commands (dots,
> lines, triangles, circles), text output using proportional fonts
> loaded from the boot device, and display of PCX images.  The above
> screen shot is simply a PCX background image containing the logo, and
> some text for the menu at the top.  Very simple.  Currently only 16
> color standard VGA modes are supported (4 bit depth), but that should
> be sufficient for a start.

The kernel splash code supports both BMP (courtesy of Mike Smith, IIRC)
and PCX (courtesy of yours truly).  I haven't looked at it in years, but
I've used it on and off to add splash screens to various FreeBSD-based
turn-key solutions I've been involved in.

Hey, how about PNG support?  Know someone we could ask?  ;)

It would be very nice if you could generalize this to allow displaying
kernel boot messages over a graphical background; I'm not sure that's
possible with our current graphical console code.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no