[Linux-fbdev-devel] Query on framebuffer implementations

[Dawud, M. <muh...@in...>]

Hi all,

I'd like to ask a quick question on framebuffer implementations if you guys
don't mind...... 

In recent releases of the red-hat linux (I'm using 7.0) the bootloader is a
graphical interface, I'm wondering how I could program something like this.
My current machine is a 166MHZ Pentium with only VESA 1.2 support so the
best framebuffer support that I have is VGA16. Furthermore I can only come
up with ugly looking graphics in 16 colors which can only start after I've
logged into the system. The lilo GUI is excellent compared to my lousy GUI,
does anyone know how lilo does this... I presume that it is also a
framebuffer dump but how does it get 256K resolution. I would really like to
write some kind of personalized GUI to replace the red-hat lilo prompt but I
am at a loss on how to proceed... Can anyone out there kindly offer me some
pointers ???

So in essence my problem is two-fold, I don't know how to load my customized
GUI to replace lilo's gui and I don't know how to code a nicer GUI using
framebuffers. Again I don't know if I'm attacking the problem in a wrong
way. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dawud