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

[Dan Williams]

On Sun, 2006-07-30 at 12:28 +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> * Ronald G Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> [060730 02:40]:
> > well we'll leave it at pretty pictures then.
> > 
> > I've never liked progress bars, etc. But many people do.
> 
> We used to do a progress bar some time when I did the bootsplash at
> SUSE, but it never was as accurate as one would want it to be. 
> So we dropped it again. Progress bars simply dont work for this kinda
> stuff.

The OS X thing isn't a progress _bar_, but a spinning wheel of sorts.
It doesn't show some arbitrary completion percentage, it's purpose is to
say "I'm doing something and I'm not frozen."

See here:
http://magazine.sharereactor.ru/pictures/Image/Raiker/macosx_x86_review/boot1.jpg

That little thing under the apple spins until the kernel has booted and
userspace begins to execute.

Progress bars in Linux startup are generally useless because startup is
such a shellscript mess that you cannot get useful status information
out of anything.

Dan