Plymouth question

[G. Michael Carter]

Ray thanks for your help.   I'm pretty safe posting to the list since 
she would be in very different areas of the internet.

The debug help and manual run helped me figure out what's going on.  (I 
think)   When doing the init 3/show splash thing I see the changes to 
the star.png file no problem.   But a reboot I don't.  There is a "no 
file found" type message on a reboot.   I'm assuming the graphic files 
need to be in the initrd file, but the 
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd doesn't appear to be 
putting them in.  I added the -v flag to the command inside and don't 
see any reference to the /usr/share/plymouth directory.

Or did I really miss the mark on this one?   Was there something I 
needed to do before hand?

Thanks
Michael

Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
>> Sorry to contact you out of the blue like this.  
> No problem!  There is a plymouth mailing list here:
>
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/plymouth
>
> but given it's a public list (with public archives) and you want this 
> to be a surprise, contacting me directly was probably more appropriate.
>> I have a few ideas.   The simplest is to change the star.png and 
>> possibly the progress_bar.png  That way I can put up a custom screen 
>> for her without learning how to program it.  (I know c/c++ but it's 
>> been a while)
> That should work fine.  I think the solar plugin may hard code some of 
> the sizes, so it's probably best to make sure the images are the same 
> size.  Alternatively, switching out the spinfinity plugin's images may 
> work better for you.
>>
>> When I tried however, the graphic boot no longer displays solar.  It 
>> falls back to the text version.
> I'm not sure why off hand.  A few questions
>
> 1) did you rebuild the initrd after making your changes (with 
> /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd) ?  You may want to back 
> up your existing initrd as a separate entry in grub.conf while testing 
> changes.
> 2) did you replace the images with png images or some other image 
> format?  plymouth only supports pngs (and i think only rgb and rgba 
> pngs at that) not say jpegs, gifs, mngs, or apngs.
> 3) if you wait for about 15 seconds into boot (so / is mounted) and 
> hit escape a couple of times does your splash show up then?  If so, 
> then the files are fine on the root filesystem, but some how aren't 
> getting copied to the initrd right.
>>
>> So my questions:
>>
>> 1.  Is there some specifics I need to look for when making the custom 
>> png files?  
> Just what I mentioned above, I think.  Of course, there may be bugs...
>> 2.  Does it keep a checksum or something?
> No.  It does copy the files to the initrd, though (since it shows up 
> before / is mounted).  Make sure you rebuild your initrd after making 
> changes
>> 3.  Why would it dump back to text version just adding the works "I 
>> was here" to the png?
> It falls back to text if it couldn't load the graphical plugin for 
> some reason. likely it was trying to open the png and couldn't.
>> 4.  Is there a log somewhere that will tell me if plymouth fails and 
>> why?
> If you add plymouth:debug to your kernel command line it may give a 
> useful error message.  alternatively, pressing ctrl-v while it's 
> running turns on verbose messages.
>> 5.  Does the rendering engine for the support animated png files?  
>> (another way to cheep out of programming it)
> No.  But spinfinity does a simple animation in the center of the 
> screen based on multiple images.  Using it as a basis may work okay 
> for you.  To switch which plugin you're using, run
>
> /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-plugin spinfinity
>
> (and then rebuild your initrd with 
> /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd)
>
> If you're going to be making a lot changes, you can run plymouth 
> manually without rebooting by doing:
>
> /sbin/init 3
>
> /sbin/plymouthd
>
> and then
>
> plymouth --show-splash
>
> (all as root)
>
> that should display it on screen.  Then to get rid of it, press escape 
> to jump back to text mode and use ctrl-alt-f3 (or whatever) to get to 
> a tty and run
>
> plymouth --quit
>
> to quit it.
>
> --Ray
>


-- 
*G. Michael Carter*

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/plymouth/attachments/20081203/0b7ce815/attachment.html