New boot animation for 12.1.0

[Daniel Drake]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>  - How easy is it to implement something nice? I see Manuel's already
> been asking you about it, and it'd be great to have something cool ;-)

The complexity of the task depends on the complexity of the graphic.
But as we really need to be light-weight, that means we have an
automatic requirement of only displaying simple graphics. Max 1 frame
change per second, I would say. If something nice can be designed
within these kinds of bounds, it can be put in place with ease.

However, due to the overall boot time decrease, and increase in
startup parallelization, I'm seeing that we have very little time to
do anything animated. The initramfs starts the animation and then
boots the rest of the system, providing a window of maybe 3-4 seconds
while we animate. Then the X startup starts, which means we *must*
freeze the screen immediately to avoid blanks and flashes (at this
point, my initial theme draws 3 dots and freezes). This was tested on
XO-1.5, I imagine XO-1.75 will be even faster.

>  - Something easily customizable? -- thinking of OOB splicing in images

The olpc plugin currently allows for one custom image to be displayed
in addition to the default ones.

Plymouth is an easily customizable platform, it comes with various
themes and a powerful and quite easy scripting language allowing you
to create more.

Daniel