Recently, in the hope of making things clearer and easier for everyone to understand, I decided to do some renaming in my splash projects. The result: the kernel patch is now called fbcondecor (previously: fbsplash), the userspace part used to display the silent splash screen during boot is called fbsplash, and there is no longer anything named gensplash. The core fbsplash applications, along with some additional utilities are distributed in a single package called splashutils (available as media-gfx/splashutils in Gentoo).
So, to sum things up: fbsplash = silent splash, fbcondecor = verbose splash.
The reasons for the name changes:
- Since the gensplash project was started, everyone referred to the userspace part as “fbsplash” anyway.
- Many people don’t realize that fbsplash is fully functional and usable without any kernel patches.
- fbcondecor (which stands for: Framebuffer Console Decorations), which was previously named “fbsplash”, has nothing to do with displaying the splash screen during boot. The only thing that it does is displaying pictures in the background of system consoles. This is not a splash screen, but a decoration and should thus be named accordingly.
Changes in Gentoo:
- From splashutils-1.5 onward, the
/etc/init.d/splashscript is called/etc/init.d/fbcondecor
SPLASH_TTYSis nowFBCONDECOR_TTYS,SPLASH_TTY_MAPisFBCONDECOR_TTY_MAP. Both are located in/etc/conf.d/fbcondecor
