boot banner project

[Sam Lawrance]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 12:48 -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> /dev/null wrote:
> > Hello any & all,
> >  O.K. I feel I must preface this with an acknowledgment that I *know*
> > this is a silly project *because* given the *incredibly* long uptimes
> > that FreeBSD is known for. >>But<< for those *few* times when FreeBSDers
> > see a boot screen, shouldn't it look really nice? Shouldn't also be able
> > to reflect the Administrators tastes and personality? Well, this is the
> > premise for my attempting this project. But before I start, I want to
> > submit an RFC. So consider this an Request for comments. This is an
> > attempt to create a Graphical boot screen that initially has the
> > following layout:
> > (a fixed width font required to view the layout correctly)
> >  --------------------------------------------------------
> > |  some                                                  |
> > |     sort                                               |
> > |        of                                              |
> > |    graphic       goes   in   this   area               |
> > |--------------------------------------------------------
> > |    boot                                                |
> > |                                                        |
> > |   messages                                             |
> > |                                                        |
> > |    seen                                                |
> > |                                                        |
> > |         here                                           |
> > |   bla...                                               |
> > |          bla...                                        |
> > |                 bla...                                 |
> > ---------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > -Chris
> 
> 
> Is it possible to do this without having to switch to an entirely
> raster-based console?  Raster consoles (like what SuSE uses) have
> been discussed in the past, and the common thinking is that the
> loss in reliability and loss in speed is a significant issue to
> consider.

For a small, non-flashy banner, grab a stack of unused characters and
draw a logo into them.  Much like what moused does to give us a nice
pointer-shaped pointer rather than an ugly block.

It'll be 1-bit, but you can pick the foreground and background color in
each block from a selection of the most popular console text colours
ever :)

I think you could allocate the top two rows of text to this and get a
nice effect without losing much.  And no raster, either.