New Boot-Loader

[Devin Teske]

Hi fellow hackers,

I'm designing an open-sourced replacement boot-loader for FreeBSD. I feel that the existing options in the boot-loader menu today can be whittled down significantly with a stateful menu system rather than a single-action item menu system.

In designing the new menu, I'd like to get your opinions. From old:

	FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE: twitpic.com/4e485w

to new:

	Replacement Boot-Loader: twitpic.com/4e46ol

NOTE: The final release will have a single-user mode option.

The new menu allows for more flexibility as selecting options 2 ("Boot Verbose") or 3 ("ACPI Support") independently toggles the status, updates the menu item, and redisplays the menu -- ever-waiting until the user ultimately presses ENTER, "1", or escapes to the prompt and types "boot". Thus, one could potentially launch single-user mode with verbosity on and ACPI disabled (if one so desired).

In addition, I really tried to capture the essence of the new logo (spent months off-and-on using different conversion programs with different inputs). In the end, I found text-image.com produced the best result. I used the official freebsd.org/logo.html Standard Logo (black and white), cropped (to 122x123) and converted to jpeg with white background. I used an "Image Width" of 45 in their "Convert into ASCII" program available here: text-image.com/convert/ascii.html

I would be distributing this as an installable package (perhaps in the ports tree if it gains popularity).
-- 
Cheers,
Devin Teske


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