Slashdot Mirror
Animate Your LILO
clarkie.mg writes: "Most linux users still see the four letters LILO when booting the PC. It's now possible to have some cool graphics at boot time with the animated LILO. You can even play a game !" Be careful of the French.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
But since I try to reboot about once in a month (due to upgrades), I won't see much of it :)
How about (to make things a little more exciting) if you miss the ball without hitting n (a randomly selected number ) bricks, there is a 1 in 10 chance that your bootsector gets wiped.
It would really help increase average uptimes, as admins would find new and innovative ways to avoid having to reboot.
Linux would reach the tops of the Netcraft uptime chart in no time!
Geesh... VGA mode -- which means you need some sort of support with your card (some old laptops don't).
:)
But how about doing it in TextMode, animating each group of characters? I think PC Tools did it with their on-screen Text-mode mouse pointer which actually looked like a mouse pointer.
Of course, having a Penguin on the first three or so lines of my screen in text mode all the time would help too.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
There is more info on the animated boot screen here with a nice large screenshot.
There is also a warning on the site for people planning on trying this out:
Before you try this, have a boot floppy ready. If something doesn't go as planned, you could RENDER YOUR SYSTEM UNBOOTABLE. You have been warned.
--Metrollica
Oh wait! let us play xbill on the boot screen. If Bill wins, the system boots Windows. If I win, I get my Linux back.
Here are instructions on how to make your very own LILO boot screens.
;)
But to do this you need a few prerequisites.
... know what The GIMP is.
... have already installed and activated The GIMP.
... know how to accomplish simple drawing activities.
... have already installed the LILO Splash Screen Script-Fu.
... know how to activate the LILO Splash Screen Script-Fu.
... know what you want
--Metrollica
Great, now if there is a problem booting the OS, LILO can say:
"Error: could not boot OS. Do you want to play a game instead?"
That's user friendly.
Hey, I object to the comment "Be careful of the French".
We are just regular people you know, we eat crème brulée every day just like the rest of you, drink expensive red wine while making silly faces as any normal person would, use our regular quota of "Oh la vache!" and "Sacrebleu", have run-o' the mill girl names and our poo smells like rose just like everybody else's
So there!
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Ha ha ha... Thanks for the laugh!
It's a pity that the links posted in the story point to the French version of my pages because I wrote them first in English. If you had taken a minute to try the little button in the top right corner of my pages (the one with the English/French flag), you would have seen that you can easily switch between the English and French versions.
Posting a link to the automatic translation of a page that was already translated from English to French is a nice way to waste your time... (but that's the point of these LILO boot screens anyway, so maybe you are not completely wrong).
-Raphaël
Linux has finally thrown that dagger at the heart of microsoft - Bloatware and Eye Candy.
You are aiming for the same end user as M$ here - this will surely strike fear into the evil empire.
;)
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I fart in your general direction! Your LILO was a hamster, and your kernel smelt of elderberries!
I have quickly edited my web pages to add the correct links. My web pages were designed to automatically give you the most appropriate version (depending on the language settings in your browser, as explained on this page). It's a pity that thimoty has posted the links that go to the French-only version of my pages.
The correct links should have been:
The site is hit rather badly by the Slashdot effect... You will have to be patient...
-Raphaël
Oops, sorry.... The third link should have been:
And I even looked at the Preview before posting... X-)
-Raphaël
No I have to go out and buy some new hardware I don't need so that the drivers take longer to load, so that I can finish my game of break out before the boot is over. Maybe I could just fragment my hard drive...
On old Pyramid 90x hardware (anyone remember them?) you could play Space Invaders on the system console, in what was known as the Console Operating System (COS) while the kernel was running. If you played too long, the console buffer would fill and the system would crash.
In other words, when you won, everyone else on the system lost.
Yes, thanks for the reminder -- they can be devious and underhanded and take advantage of you when you're at your most vunerable ;)
Although I've used LILO for many years, I think at this point I've pretty much converted over to the GNU GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB).
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it. Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures. So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
GRUB also supports other systems by performing the traditional read-the-first-block-from-the-partition method using the chainloader command. This lets you boot other OSes whose filesystems GRUB doesn't understand.
Once you get past the arcane command syntax, GRUB turns out to be a wonderful tool. I recommend checking it out.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
AFAIK this is not SuSE-only, but they are among the first to have it in their distribution.
I've got a SuSE 7.3 installation with their default LILO stuff, it really looks nice - during bootup, while the kernel messages are scrolling in the middle of the screen, you have graphics around the borders, part of which is animated (top right corner in this case). More of the same during shutdown.
It may not be interesting for those chasing uptimes or using their box as servers, but for workstations that get switched off for the night (I don't want to hear that noise all night, and it lets me save the trees along the way) it's a nice display every day.
I've also seen reports on how to modify this display in some german magazine, can't remember wether it was c't or iX from Heise, or the Linux Magazin. It's been after SuSE 7.3 came out, but it's been a couple of months at least.
Yes, you do need the SuSE version of LILO because this is the only version that includes support for callback functions and timer events. This is mandatory for making the animations work. All other versions of LILO can only display static images and do not let you choose where the menu is displayed, how the keyboard input should be handled, and so on.
This is explained on my help page.
By the way, if you go to a SuSE mirror site to download the required packages, you will find:
Have fun, but please read the warnings on my help page before playing with LILO.
-Raphaël
I don't think you're right about that. I'm running Debian unstable, with lilo version 22.1 (package version 6) which matches the upstream's most stable. There's another poster who also is running this, and he can't get it to work. I'm not going to try tonight though, it's too late for me to be messing with the bootloader!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's working on my laptop.
Install alien if you don't have it yet, then grab lilo.rpm from one of the SUSE mirrors the author of the eye candy pointed out above. I ran "alien lilo.rpm", then "dpkg -i lilo_21.7.5-55_i386.deb" because I wasn't familiar with the alien -i option...
It works, although my text is all squishy right now. It makes me consider getting the Linux Progress Patch (the homepage is currently fallow, it seems) and gdm or xdm just for uninterrupted graphics.
I think it could make my parents go "ooooh."
personally I just put a little bit of script into rc.6, so that every time i reboot it cat's the output of 'cookie' into the boot message.
Hey Presto, new proverb every time you reboot.
There is a screen of a gun. Press your mouse to play and pull the trigger. If the chamber has no bullet in it you will hear a click and boot into Linux. If it has a bullet in it, the gun will go off and you will boot into Windows. Do you want to play? (Y/N)
Oh yeah, that surely reminds me of my old Amiga 1000 - graphics, sound, sprites, simple vectors - and all in 1 boot sector! (yeah, I know - the data was on the last track on floppy but it surely looked great...
;)
Who knows, maybe someone will implement it on LILO or GRUB - it will surely be more fun to boot
Hetz (Heunique)
I'm going to get -infinity for this but, OK.
this is too much. crap like this, thrown in because it's "kewl", is why the real world doesn't take Linux seriously.
I want LILO to load my OS, and no more. I can wait until I boot to play games and see the pretty colors.