Quoting Richard Rauch (rauch@rice.edu):
> First, I'd point out that the messages *do* grow on you, Nicolas.  (Though
> on a faster system, you may not be able to do more than browse the
> messages to get a vague sense of where the computer is.  (^&)

This has come up before on other lists, other OSs.  Back when,
I used to point to my Sun reps at my booting Sun and mention
that my desktop users were tired of seeing "errors".  I'd then
boot the NeXT desktop that showed a spinny disk (or network
for netboots); if there was a problem I hit ctrl-| or something
and saw the main console.  MacOS X does the same thing.

My users don't know what to do with "starting named.... failed"
messages and they are gone by the time I get there.

Key to pulling it off seemed to be that NeXT and Apple build
the hardware, supported about 4 video cards and have real boot proms.

OTOH, it seems that the boot loader could set a variable (by
default or as an exception) that shows/hides the hardware
discovery methods.  Spewing a pretty picture makes lots of
hardware presumptions, the greatest of which is "i386".

AFTER the hardware discovery (once init starts and we get into
rc), we have other options.

I do rather like the RedHat boot up sequence so far that each
startup script emits an optionally green OK or red FAILED.
It's fairly clear to the clueless.

But still, passing "-s" means single user.  Perhaps passing "-q"
means that the startup scripts should supress success message.

Solaris seems to allow "boot -v" to let me see tons of info. It
was annoying that it was so quiet until I learned about -v. It's
now in the eeprom on my machines (end users don't sit in front
of an E4500). It
was annoying that it was so quiet until I learned about -v. It's
now in the eeprom on my machines (end users don't sit in front
of an E4500).


End result: the clueful admin can say "boot -v" and get "the usual"
while Emma the Equities Trader can start her computer, see
"booting..." and get her KDE login in a couple minutes.

So, boot allows a suppress flag that HW discovery needs to note.
rc scripts note the flag to stay quiet on success.  BSD becomes
more marketable.

not quick, but not overwhelming to you who write boot loaders.

chuck