Opportunity for speedup

[Mitch Bradley]

I just measured the time taken by the boot animation by the simple 
technique of renaming /usr/bin/rhgb-client so the initscripts can't find it.

With boot animation, OS build 7 (an older 8.2.1 candidate) takes 60 
seconds from first dot (indicating OFW transfer to Linux) to Sugar 
"prompt for your name".   Without it, 53 seconds.  I repeated the test 
several times with consistent results.

Clearly, it should be possible to display that amount of information in 
much less than 7 seconds.

The boot animation code is in the OLPC domain, not the upstream domain, 
so replacing it should be relatively free of upstream politics.

So if anybody is interested in implementing a relatively simple 
boot-time speedup, I offer this as low-hanging fruit.

I suggest 1 second (differential time between animation and no-animation 
cases) as a reasonable target goal, assuming images of the complexity of 
the current ones.  Arbitrary full-screen graphics might require more 
time, but speeding up the baseline case is a good starting point.

Go wild.