Proposal: Integrated boot themes on LiveCDs and installations
Author: Donnie Berkholz


Premises
	1) The progress bar and icons overlap, but don't move at the same rate.
		This is ugly.
	2) The icons look childish, not slick, shiny or professional.
	3) There's little integration between bootloader, bootsplash and *dm
		login screens, which results in a jarring boot process full of changes.

Requirements
	From grub to actual login screen, what do people really need to see?

	They should be able to _assume_ services start successfully, so we may not
	need to display that. But we do want to deal with failures gracefully, and
	_not_ drop the user to text mode. Perhaps we can create some sort of window
	saying "Service X failed" during the bootsplash progress, or perhaps some
	sort of icon with a big red "X" across it.

	They need to know the computer hasn't frozen during the process, so we need
	some sort of motion. Classic ideas include dots or bars moving back and
	forth, rotating icons, or icons with something happening to them -- shining,
	etc. A shine flowing down the Gentoo "G" would be one idea, as if it's
	slowly being angled in one direction, or the light source is moving.

	Do they need to know how far along in the boot process they are? It helps in
	estimating how long until they get a real login screen. A real progress
	measure on the screen can help this instead of an unmeasurable flowing back
	and forth. But how specifically do they need to know? A few general stages
	may be enough -- for example, before "boot" runlevel, entering "boot"
	runlevel, entering "default" runlevel, almost ready to start X.

	Also, we're Gentoo so we should probably be using shiny new stuff like
	gfxboot, progress bars, etc. and displaying that we have the latest
	technology available.

Ideas
	Create a thematic connection between a grub background and a more complex
	bootsplash background. The grub background will only look good with more
	solid colors [1-2]; lots of gradients look terrible [3-4]. The concept will
	use multiple blocks of solid colors. Possibilities are shades of purple,
	green, white and black.

	Another possibility with lots of potential is the gfxboot patches to grub,
	which originated with SuSE. As is typical for SuSE-originating packages, it
	seems to completely lack any sort of homepage. The gfxboot patch allows for
	grub animations, similar to an animated bootsplash [5-7]. This creates
	options such as a graphical countdown to the boot selection timeout, like
	disappearing or appearing dots or a progress bar.

	[5] contains a superb example of what gfxboot can do, and the author just
	posted it a couple of weeks ago for GoboLinux. Ubuntu's incorporated gfxboot
	for its next release, Dapper, and SuSE's used gfxboot since at least 8.1,
	a couple years ago. Some examples of gfxboot configurations are mirrored in
	my webspace [8]. The gfxboot patch hasn't reached the portage tree yet, but
	Bugzilla contains an ebuild with patches [9].

Proposed solution
	Create a new bootsplash theme to fix premises 1 and 2. Follow up with an
	on-theme gfxboot configuration -- it can be nearly the same as bootsplash.
	In addition, distribute optional matching themes with gdm, kdm and any other
	*dm they're contributed for. Don't default to them, however, except on
	LiveCDs. Grub will install the gfxboot theme and the example grub.conf will
	list it, as will the handbook. Since people write their own grub.conf files,
	this is as close as Gentoo gets to defaulting on.

	LiveCD: same isolinux, new bootsplash, new [gk]dm theme
	On-disk: install gfxboot theme, new bootsplash, install non-default [gk]dm
		themes. (Possibly default on the themes, if they're good?)

Caveats
	Since grub-0.9x is only available for x86 and amd64, the same holds true for
	gfxboot.

1. http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/paulj/20050511
2. http://www.linuxcdmall.com/vidalinux-screenshots-8.html
3. http://linux.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/GNU-GRUB-Screenshot-1092.html
4. http://www.linuxcdmall.com/redhat-screenshots-7.html
5. http://www.wotfun.com/pipermail/gobolinux-devel/2006-January/000507.html
6. http://www.wotfun.com/pipermail/gobolinux-devel/attachments/20060124/04ab77c1/gobo-splash-0001.jpg
7. http://clusterix.livecd.net/screen.php
8. http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/splash/
9. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103272