Guest post by Plymouth is a freedesktop.org project to create a flicker free graphical bootup system designed and developed by Red Hat and included in Fedora 10. Red Hat has been working on Xorg drivers and within the Linux kernel to improve and enhance the kernel mode support needed for Plymouth. Fedora 10 included support for many ATI cards and this is being developed further in Fedora 11 to cover Intel and Nvidia cards as well. Plymouth supports a flexible and powerful plug-in system which can be used to create Plymouth themes. Fedora includes several of them including a simple progress bar and the solar plugin. Now additional work is being done to improve many things and this will land up in Fedora 11 as well.
Instead of working on this kind of crap, why can’t they focus on things that are more important from a usability point of view ?
I understand that there are a bunch of different ways to do what Plymouth does, and they are just trying to create a simpler way that should be used by everyone, but IMHO, I think more important stuff needs attention.
Why do I need to keep restarting X everytime i hookup my laptop to an external screen ? Why can’t it detect that screen’s maximum resolution automatically ? I know some of these things might be related to drivers and closed source drivers might stop some of the attempts to do this, but there’s no reason for why it can’t work with some of the available drivers. It’s silly (and I think it embarasses every desktop Linux user) to have to restart X because of an external screen.
And I’m sure I could find many more examples of this kind of stuff. Many people spend time developing silly and useless plugins for Compiz Fusion when they could probably spend it solving stupid bugs that have persisted for years on desktop apps. Users who come from other platforms won’t care about spinning cubes if they can’t perform simple tasks they do every day or configure some things with no hassle.
I’m an experienced user (and a previous Gentoo and Slackware user) who doesn’t really care about manually editing a config file every once in a while, but sometimes I just want to get some work done and I don’t want the system to get in my way.
Edited 2009-03-06 10:39 UTC
Rhetoric question, why submitting this offtopic comment just for the sake of it? Should you find other issues important, why not working on them given the experience with Gentoo distribution, proposing a patch for upstream which may benefit to other users and quietly leave this topic alone?
I don’t think it’s totally offtopic. Reminding people that they are working in the wrong direction is not exactly offtopic, it’s related.
And although I defend and agree with the F/OSS idea of “if you don’t like it, submit a patch”, I know that’s not always possible, so when you can’t do it you should at least express your ideas and feelings about something so others might pick it up if they agree with it.
People like to throw that philosophy around, but they forget others have jobs, school and other important things in their life. Some people probably even work (or contribute) in other F/OSS projects, and they just can’t do everything.
Contributing to the F/OSS world is not always about code, it’s also about ideas and discussion (and people usually forget that), and whenever I do that, I try to express it the better I can.
They are.
erm… Plymouth does exactly this. Maybe read up on something before making a clueless comment/rant?
XRANDR should help solve those issues. Already developed and working for many situations and drivers.
Different problems unrelated to the graphics subsystem. Throwing more people at a problem does not mean it will be solved.
The reason people write plugins for Compiz fusion is because they enjoy it or the effects. I doubt any corporate backer is paying anyone for such frivolities, so telling people what to do here is like me telling you how to spend your free time. I doubt the developers would appreciate that much.
And this may be at the heart of the problem – an experienced user with how things worked struggling with how they currently work and new technology changes.
Since the last year there has been tremendous amount of work done on the graphics subsystem and it is all coming together.
Edited 2009-03-06 11:46 UTC
I know they are. I just wanted to reinforce my point of view.
erm… Plymouth does exactly this. Maybe read up on something before making a clueless comment/rant?
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If Plymouth is an application that provides a splash screen on boot, explain to me how that will help me detect different resolutions if I connect my laptop to different external screens at different places. I’ve read up on Plymouth, and if it does more than what it says it does, then someone forgot to mention it.
Right. And as soon as I activate Xinerama XRANDR goes away. Maybe it’s an issue with ATI drivers by itself and it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s an issue.
Ok, maybe I was a little harsh on this one, but I’m just saying that if I managed to come up with time to contribute to an OSS project, I’d probably try to use it to solve important problems. Sometimes people forget that F/OSS is all about people trying to solve each others problems.
I’m not struggling with “how things worked”. I’ve started using Ubuntu a long time ago because I didn’t wanted to get stuck in arcane distros like Slackware, so I’ve been trying to keep up with the evolution of things.
I know it has, and not only by F/OSS developers but by driver developers as well. Up until a while ago, Xinerama on my ATI X2300 was nearly impossible.
Plymouth is described in detail in the first link. Before jumping to incorrect conclusions about what it is, read about it more. Plymouth uses kernel mode system aka KMS which is a step towards solving some of the resolution issues as well. Plymouth is not just for pretty graphics and it also helps log boot messages correctly.
If you want to know about KMS and why it is important, refer
http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/
Then don’t use Xinerama. You should be using XRANDR anyways because it does all that Xinerama did and much better. If you have bugs, file them with the X.org folks or your distribution and help make it better.
On my machine, XRANDR works fine and detects resolution correctly. I have a slightly older ATI card, so it’s probably better supported. In any case, it can be done. No restarting the X server, no hacking around with xorg.conf. It Just Works ™.
More often, it’s about
– scratching your own itches.
– scratching the itches of people that pay your salary
– technical indulgence
Well there is your problem.
I’ve found Ubuntu to be one of the worst dristo’s for needless rebooting (though, even Ubuntu picks up the maximum screen resolution on my laptop)
My current preferred distro, Arch, picks up the dual head on my laptop and i can just plug / unplug additional monitors to my hearts content. Never had a problem with that until I switched to Ubuntu.
The problem with Ubuntu is, to make it more usable to the novice, they’ve sacrificed some of the shortcuts us experieced users would take in the more hands on distros.
So if your problem is having to constantly reboot to apply changes – then perhaps you shouldn’t be using such a beginner level Linux.
I assume that you have already tried using xrander, failed, and filed a bug report in freedesktop.org instead of just bitching about it, right?
– Gilboa
I can’t believe that anyone can say the work redhat is doing isn’t a step in the right direction. This work is just enhancing work already done, which has taken us away from a console screen during start up that’s full of scrolling text providing verbose output about hardware detection and some system configuration information. No “ordinary” user wants to see that, it alienates them and makes the system seem overly technical and hard to use.
The verbose console output is nice as an option, for the more technical user, when there’s a problem to diagnose. When it comes to the average computer user, though, it’s definitely a usability issue if viewing that information is ever mandatory. They need a simple explanation, and ideally a simple tool to resolve the problem if the OS cannot be relied upon to fix it automatically.
Edited 2009-03-06 12:06 UTC
I don’t mind them beautifying the startup (even though I prefer the text based startup of old).
But what I would really like is if Metacity could be fixed. Basic functionality should be a priority. Especially in a window manager.
I don’t know if a bug has been filed, I don’t know how to do it myself.
But basically here is the problem. It doesn’t remember the unmaximised windows size. I am using Firefox, I click the maximise button. If I press F11 to go fullscreen and then later exit fullscreen. Metacity thinks that window size should be that dimensions of a maximised window.
I have had this occurring for a long time and I wonder if others have the same issue.
Edited 2009-03-06 12:32 UTC
Go to http://bugzilla.gnome.org. Get a bugzilla account and choose metacity in the drop down list and file a bug report explaining your problem.
No problem here. I’ve tested it with a firefox window that was in 2 different sizes. I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 here. If I remember, I’ll test it with Fedora 10 later.
Fedora is just great. I’ve not used it in ages (though it generally worked pretty well for me back when I did) but they’re doing so much good work that’s going to benefit me eventually whichever distro I choose to use.
They do a lot more than push out a bleeding edge distro with a pretty UI every 6 months – they (Fedora and Redhat) really put a lot of work into developing solutions for many of the niggling Linux problems that exist on many levels of the stack.
It always seems to me that – generally – Red Hat really know which side their bread is buttered. They know they owe their business to a healthy OSS ecosystem and they have the courage to stand behind that and develop stuff in the open, even though that eventually benefits their competitors too. Regardless of whether one likes to use their products, I think that their resisting the natural urge to hoard their intellectual property to try to get an “edge” deserves a huge helping of respect.
They’re not perfect – AFAIK we still don’t know the details of the Fedora server compromises last year. But on the development side I do really appreciate their way of doing things.
Since when do you need to restart X to get an external monitor working? I’ve plugged in an external monitor into my Aspire One after bootup and X has detected the resolution, and I’ve been able to select the resolution in Gnome’s monitors program.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working on a beautiful bootup sequence. Remember how many people are using Linux now because they were impressed with the Youtube videos of Compiz. To use a much over-quoted phrase from Mark Shuttleworth, “Pretty is a feature”.
when are they going to implement a SHUTDOWN sequence? rhgb didn’t do it, and neither does plymouth in fedora 10
shutdown should be really really fast. No need for a progress bar for that. Just fix the slowdown instead.