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
“Many people don’t realize that fbsplash is fully functional and usable without any kernel patches.”
Yeah I only realised that when temporarily switching to the vanilla kernel.
summarized and translated:
http://pettinix.blogspot.com/2007/09/fbsplash-cambia-nome.html
Hi Michal,
summaring: to use new splash version I have to download it from Gentoo. Do I need to patch my kernel with something? Using 1.3 version I did this, passing also informations to the kernel command line (“splash=silent,theme:…”).
Can you help me? I’m a bit confused.
Thanks,
Giuseppe
When you need to upgrade your kernel, you simply use the fbcondecor patch instead of fbsplash. Other than that, you probably don’t need to worry about it.
Hi Michal,
I need to cross compile splasutils-1.5.2 package. I already patched my 2.6.23 kernel.
The problem is that (inside Makefile) you are using libtool for building files.
Because I’m working with a cross-compiler, it fails building due to the following error.
“libtool: unable to infer tagged configuration”
I suppose this is beacuse host libtool isn’t aware of my cross-compiler tool; I mean, it doesn’t match any tag equivalent to the one it knows.
Trying to use libtoolize (to use my own libtool script) it fails because no configure.ac is available into splash tree.
Can you please give me a suggestion?
Thanks a lot,
Giuseppe
However, supposing libtoolize command runs ok, Makefile will always invoke libtool from standard path, and this should be a limitation for cross compiling splashutils.
The next version of splashutils will feature an autoconf-based config system, which I think should solve this isusue.
> The next version of splashutils will feature an autoconf-based config system,
> which I think should solve this isusue.
Is there a forecast for this version?
Thanks again,
Giuseppe