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Fascinating article, but while searching through aptitude for some of those alternative init engines, I came across bootsplash instead and I couldn't resist!

http://www.bootsplash.org/

Uh, yeah, I guess I could make good use of bootchart from the article too... mmm... more eye candy.... and you can keep looking at / admiring your stats / comparing with you friends' stats long after after you've booted up anyway!

Seriously, real Linux servers don't reboot :P

(burned by playing with runit some time ago)

Oh, I see. Claim Linux can't do something, then wait for everyone to fall over themselves to prove Linux is teh r0x0rs!!! This almost seems a troll since SuSe, Mandriva, and Fedora have been doing exactly what you're asking about for quite some time.
Anyway, check out Bootsplash, it does what you're looking for.

• displaying the logo
• displaying loading linux.....
• displaying loading init_rd.....
• the screen is cleared and the words Uncompressing linux... Ok, booting the kernel.

I could go for the bootsplash patch, but that adds nearly 200K to the (compressed) kernel.

I don't really want to as I'd be happy to just have the Uncompressing linux... line under my syslinux logo (640x480x16 colours only adds 10K to the distribution). After that, all the kernel messages are sent to /dev/ttyS1 so they don't appear on the screen.

So, anybody knows where in the kernel source (preferably 2.4) is the screen cleared? Any clues I could follow?

I believe you are thinking along the lines of what bootsplash http://www.bootsplash.org/ does. This is nothing similar; it's designed to visualize where performance bottlenecks are located during the startup procedures. But then, after reading all of the other commentary on here, you may have picked up on that fact already. In that case, I apologize for the redundancy.

I am not qualified to suggest any distro, as I am still glued to my windowmaker on RH8, while booting up knoppix now and then in vmware, but I can tell you that if you can take the pain of explaining people, the real eye-candy one can have with some effort, I am sure anyone would get convinced.

The biggest turnoff with linux for me till a few years ago, was the non-availability of good looking fonts, which made IE look like a god-send. But with the bitstream-vera and msttcorefonts, anything in X looks just cool. Actually the bitstream-vera fonts themselves'd be sufficient. Setting a single font for different styles might sound awful, but once you get used to the anti-aliasing, everything else'd look like garbage, including the venerable good looking fonts in Windows.
Opera + xterm with anti-aliasing should be sufficient for ppl like me who don't use many other apps, that use mouse a lot.

Damn, just a console with bootsplash installed would be more than enough, to trick people that fonts in linux aren't bad :p

It's tailored for gentoo, but most stuff applies to most distributions I guess. Not that I'm using them. ;)

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=49036

Then you can get consoles which look like this:
http://www.alledora.co.uk/images/fb0.jpg
or
http://www.bootsplash.org/silent-mode.jpg

Files can be recived from
http://www.bootsplash.org/

It's tailored for gentoo, but most stuff applies to most distributions I guess. Not that I'm using them. ;)

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=49036

Then you can get consoles which look like this:
http://www.alledora.co.uk/images/fb0.jpg
or
http://www.bootsplash.org/silent-mode.jpg

Files can be recived from
http://www.bootsplash.org/