Re: [gentoo-user] Re: about boot with framebuffer

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 04 July 2011 11:20:43 Mark Knecht did opine thusly:
> > The way I've been doing this only required `vesa' or `uvesa' and
> > some special kernel line stuff.  None of the X related stuff is
> > necessary.
> > 
> > From covici's post... I think I may need to say uvesa where I've
> > been saying vesa.
> > 
> > I'm going to try that some time today.  Its already enabled in
> > my kernel
> 
> I'm a little confused by his post also, but I've never run a machine
> without Xorg so maybe it's a technical point. With a framebuffer I
> believe you can get a boot screen like the Install CD - a bunch of
> little Tux's across the top - so you're doing graphics at that
> point but you're not running X?
> 
> I was curious about this topic awhile back wondering if you could
> run a Gentoo VM with only a framebuffer and get any graphics at
> all, or is it just that the framebuffer is used to give you more
> control over the console font/height/width selection.
> 
> (I've never run a framebuffer, if that's not obvious!)

bootsplash does not run under X (well, on redhat it used to, but you 
really don't want to go there) - this should be obvious as you don't 
see the X start-up sequence happening at early boot time.

There are many things boot splash could use for displaying images 
(fbcon etc etc) or even something of it's own invention. I'm not 
familiar enough with it to say how it really does it.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com