White background with OLPC logo

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Jordan Crouse wrote:

> But its not - your patch just adds our specific scheme which is just as 
> arbitrary and inflexible as the original scheme.

The original scheme matches the EGA "standard" palette.
My scheme is just its inverse (in brightness, not RGB),
with a few adjustments here and there to get better
contrast.


> Unfortunately,
> this is not a solution that scales very well for every Tom, Dick and
> Harry that want the console colors to be their corporate color scheme
> (Of course, I vote for AMD Green #007A51).

I see no other way to get a new *default* color palette than
hard-coding it.  One crazy idea could be embedding color
tables in modules, but I'll leave it as an exercise for
insane people.


> And that doesn't even get into the whole logo discussion - but needless
> to say, if you were unwilling to post the logo here for fear of size,
> then thats probably not something that Linus will willingly take into 
> the kernel for us.

It's as big as the logo in OFW, of course: 360x96, but
in 8bit.

Unfortunately, kernel logos must be stored in the
horribly inefficient PPM format, that makes the file
400KB long (500KB as a diff).

We could make it a little smaller by trimming the image
edges, but then we'd spoil the perfect match with OFW.

We could gzip the image data, but is it really worth it?
The patch is clean as is.  Trying to be too much is a
sure receipt for rejection.


> And nearly everybody I have talked to agrees that they will
> see some sort of splash screen all the way until Sugar loads.

Then why don't we also drop the penguin logo from the kernel?
And why not drop the logos from OFW too?

The only thing that totally sucks and should therefore be
fixed is what we have now: a nice OLPC logo from OFW shortly
being replaced by an ugly black console with a penguin logo
in a corner.

> How or why this will actually get done is a matter of some
> discussion, but I think everybody can agree that in normal
> operation that nobody will see the kernel boot process, nor 
> the logo.

This is a band aid done in time for B4.  It's a clear
improvement.  Try it out... maybe show it to someone.

It can be reverted as quickly as it was applied once
we don't need it any more.  Writing and testing it
patches costed me far less time than defending it :-)


> Oh - wait, you argue, what about the developers that want to
> see debug messages?  I ask you - do we really need to carry around
> many K of bytes so they can see a stylized logo and a white on
> black screen during boot? I vote not.

If you read the patch, you'll see that we jusr replace Tux
with the OLPC logo.  The balance would be even if our
logo was't a little bigger.  It could be made so, but
in my opinion it looks better as in OFW.


> Exactly - so why is any of this even useful to the end user?

Because we won't have nothing else ready in time for
B4, which is due in a few days, unless I'm mistaken.

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti
 \X/  http://www.codewiz.org/