[Etherboot-developers] Fancy menu system

[Anselm M. H. <eth...@ho...>]

Good morning etherboot community,

I spent some half nights on this sub-project and now want to release
the first demo menu featuring graphics at 320x200 (256 colours).
It's in its development, that's why I won't release the source code
for building it right now: I first want the worst bugs fixed before
any other people dig inside.

The menu image is about 255k, which seems rather much. One of the
reasons is that I found no time for even the cheapest graphics
compression, and having a total of > 220,000 graphics pixels has its
costs. The pure code (which must be loaded anyway) is about 19k, plus
the "ressource map" with 6k, which in my opinion is small a footprint.

The menu - in this form - offers the choice between three boot options
(/dev/hda, tftp:/lts/vmlinuz.ltsp and /dev/fd0) as well as the option
to get the computer halted (no acpi funstuff, just the display that
the user may turn off the box); a timeout defaults to booting Linux
after some seconds, with timeoutbar. I borrowed design as well as some
additional graphics inside, you will see and recognize. Requirements:
Etherboot with chained-loader-support (5.0.6 definitively works, but
even 5.0.1 should do... I only have a .6 here) and some kind of
vga-graphics-board. Should later a 640x400 mode be implemented, some
vesa stuff on your board would be required too, but that's out of
reach today.

Please understand this as a feature demonstration, just a step on my
way to go. When the worst bugs are out and at least the basic set of
features is in (e.g. there is not an arithmetic multiplication yet, just
add and sub working) it will go open-source no doubt. Just sit down
and *whow it can do this* :-)

The script code that generated this menu (sorry, not yet the bitmaps I
created/copied) is available for http download along with the menu.nbi
file, get it from http://www.feldhausnetz.de/ebm/menu.zip

Please give your opinion. Any features you really *really* need?
Anything you would have done completely different (except design,
which is cheap-o, quarter-an-hour, late-night job)? Like it (I hope)?

Best regards,
 Anselm Martin Hoffmeister <eth...@ho...>
 Stockholm Projekt Computer-Service