[OLPC-devel] Re: I tested the new graphical interface in buildrom

[Jordan Crouse]

On 26/07/06 22:19 -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> 
> looks nice. It did not boot. When I hit a key on the keyboard, the 
> display went away. My serial port dongle is back at work (!@#$!#$!@#$#@! 
> -- how could I forget to pack it?) so I can't see what's on serial :-) I 
> have a USB mouse connected but it appears to have no control of anything.

Arrow keys control the pictures, enter will return whatever the current
icon is.  Everything else does happen on the serial, so without it, you
would be a bit lost. I very much doubt that we would use the mouse - its 
not worth the extra code.

> But I can confirm that under linuxbios, the new buildrom will put up a 
> nice picture ... I can't see if anything else is going on. At this point 
> I can not really use it for anything.

I thought I got the USB boot working correctly - but YMMV.  If you had a
shell we coud debug it in about 10 minutes.. :)

> Now I wonder ... is it too terrible an idea to display boot messages 
> under the pretty pictures? Just so people have some confidence that 
> actions are occuring?

Internationalizing any strings on the screen is not something I think we
want to get involved in.  Imaging just the logistics of "Please wait,
booting" in 300 languages?

> Also, the pictures were black and white, and no changes (highlighting or 
> whatever) occured. IIRC on the web page each picture had some sort of 
> highlight that occured in sequence -- is this intended to happen on OLPC?

There is no animation, but the icons should be highlighted when you arrow
left or right.  Its a little bit less impressive then the web page because
we're in 16 bit mode, so some of the subtly is washed out.

> It takes precisely 10 seconds for the pictures to appear. We can speed 
> this up when we make linuxbios less verbose. I'd like to get to 5.

Agreed - though we will have to do the stupid wait for the USB enumeration,
though I think we could probably get the UI up quicker, and then put a 
little "waiting" icon somewhere on there.

> nice work. This is absolutely the best looking thing I've ever been 
> associated with. It's really great looking IMHO.

Thank the good folks at Redhat - they are the geniuses.  I just 
memcpy things to a screen. :)

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Senior Linux Engineer
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
<www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>