[OpenBIOS] Re: boy is EFI a kludge!

[Gavin Robert Brewer]

Chris Maresca wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Gavin Robert Brewer wrote:
> 
> > There is a lot of spam during linux bootup that strikes me as gratuitous
> > techie garbage. It would be better to find a way of booting directly
> > into the OpenWindows or some such.
> 
> Er, that would be really bad on a server.  What I really want is to boot
> to serial console, then initialize the graphics card if it exists.

Er, I was not referring to a Server. I was referring to a system built
by the people FOR the people; not just for business. It's a matter of
personal taste. 
  
> He's already complained about it, mostly about all the sigs and
> self-promotion. BUT, would rather have that than not know what's going on,
> ala windows & mac...

Why not redirect the boot sequence to a log file? Then you would not get
all the nasty looking spam; but you could take a look at it, (if you
wanted). 

What I do not understand about you calif. techies, is that you have
little or no aesthetic sense. Not wishing to be rude, but I think that
sometimes you simply dont care. My old g/f always told me never to say
'I dont care'. 

Form and function are two sides of the same jewel in my view. It HAS to
look good.
 
> BTW, one of the advantages of living in Silicon Valley is that there are a
> number of Linux gurus living around here...  Linus regularly attends SVLUG
> and BALUG meetings.  He would have been at Linux10, but he's on vacation
> in Finland right now...

Okay, but pls. remember that there are other OSes out there apart from
Linux.
 
> > We can get around this by hand-coding in some basic graphics primitives.
> > Award BIOS managed to do it with the famous 'Energy Saver' trademark we
> > all see when we power up our PC's...so it must be possible for our
> > coders to capitalise on this kind of 'instant graphics'.


> Hhmmm, that's just gratuitous eye candy, no?  Besides, it's pretty trivial
> to replace those graphics with logos or other stuff.  

It may be eye-candy, but how do they do it? The point is, that they
command instant graphics, which means an instant GUI. 

It is my dream to see an instant GUI appear on the screen at power-up. 

There is nothing stopping anyone seeing the bootloader sequence
appearing at startup; however this should be done inside a window, not
in plain ol' text mode. Again, it is a matter of aesthetics.

> I think that doing
> things that are new and usefull (like serial consoles) would really help
> get people and hardware manufacturers interested.  Imagine being able to
> run a server farm with no graphics cards, just a serial console and
> ethernet...

The server farm is a cool idea. If you want, I can submit the outline
design idea for my new multiprocessor machine. Building a multiprocesing
server is quite easy, (some dudes in a UK uni. managed to cobble one
together from old 486 CPUs)..the problem is the operating system...

As a solution to this, I would suggest porting and using Mach. The
source is very much complete, and is available from Carnegie-Mellon
university at:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/public/www/mach.html

In my view, there is no dichotomy between useful and aesthetically
pleasing.
I would even go as far as to say that functionality and form are united
under the heading of Quality, (see Zen and the art of Motorcycle
Maintenance).

Textual interfaces are pretty much obsolete. You should be able to
emulate them at will, but the quality of the system fonts is often poor,
and given today's PCs, could be a LOT better. Whilst we are at it, we
might as well have a GUI at startup.

Have a nice day,
		Gavin.

-- 
~--(Eric Developer)--~
 
   http://eric.sourceforge.net
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