[OLPC-devel] Re: Boot tasks -- the iPAQ way

[Joshua Wise]

As promised, the tarball of LAB stuff can be found at:

http://joshuawise.com/lab.tar.gz

To include this in a kernel, untar it, and add lab/ to the core-y line in
the top level Makefile. Also add an include for it, such as:

source "lab/Kconfig"

to the architecture-specific Kconfig (on ARM, arch/arm/Kconfig).

joshua


On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Jordan Crouse wrote:

> On 19/07/06 09:23 -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
>> I will once again repeat my plea: the most important thing we can put in
>> BIOS flash is capability. Yes, graphics are nice, but if you sacrifice
>> capability (such as mknod, mkdir, etc) then you will find yourselves, at
>> some point, wishing you had the capability, not the pretty pictures. So,
>> let's be careful about trading off capability for nice looking boot
>> screens.
>>
>> In particular, if the quest for graphical boot screens drives us away
>> from busybox and into kernel-mode applications programming, then I think
>> we've taken the wrong path.
>
> I'm going to take the opposite position - If the ROM Is hosed in the field,
> then there isn't much a shell is going to be able to do for 99.99% of the
> intended users.  Its nice to have for the uber hackers among us, but we can't
> let that distract us from a slick user experience.
>
> Certainly a shell is important, especially at this point in time, but as we
> improve the ROM, the shell is going to fall further into disuse.  Eventually,
> it is my hope that we'll be able to disconnect the menu option all-together.
>
> Luckily, for the near future, we can have our cake and eat it too.  The UI
> I'm working on should come in about 13k or so, plus 100k for the pictures
> (thats raw picture data - it will compress fabulously) so we shouldn't have
> to compromise too much at this point.
>
> Jordan
> -- 
> Jordan Crouse
> Senior Linux Engineer
> Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
> <www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>
>
>
>