Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: [Etherboot-users] Request for Comments

[Michael B. <mb...@fe...>]

On Mon, 27 May 2002, Ken Yap wrote:
> >a/ Graphical boot logos
> I would very like to see this but by means of loading a menu program
> which does all the fancy things rather than the way it's done now by
> encoding the menu in the DHCP reply packet, which is becoming rather
> packed with features. I started some work on this but didn't take it
> beyond proof of concept, see mknbi-menu. My intention was next to take
> an interpreter like LUA (www.lua.org) to allow people to write menus as
> LUA scripts. LILO has some nice stuff you might be able to borrow from.
> Unfortunately I have only square tuits at the moment, no round ones (bad
> pun).
> If you pull this off, you will not need some of the additional features
> you proposed to introduce in your previous posting.

Is this not already possible via judicious use of the extensions-path
option and the ANSI escape sequence "<esc>['filename'#"?  Without filling
up the DHCP packet, you can specify a menu file via the extensions-path
option (or etherboot.extensions-path, if you've already upgraded to
encapsulated options!) and the menu file can contain escape sequences to
load icons, backdrops etc from further files.

> >b/ Localized Etherboot version (text output in german, for example)
> Again, a user controllable graphics and menu capability might make this
> issue unimportant. Booting is normally so fast that before you know it,
> the kernel messages have appeared. If you could boot a menu, then before
> you know it, you have a graphics screen, and you just see the Probing,
> etc messages flash past.

Very true.  On my system, the only message that is actually visible is
"Boot from Network or Local?": all the others vanish off the screen before
you could even read enough to determine the language they were written in!

Maybe it would be worth localizing this single message since it does
prompt for user interaction?

Michael Brown
http://www.fensystems.co.uk