[Announce: fungetty, a fun new getty for Linux framebuffers]

[Matt Graham]

Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
[snip]
> If so, then maybe you should have a look at fungetty, a
> replacement for the standard Linux getty that can display
> full-color graphics above the login prompt.  I hacked this up
> over the last week or so, and it seems to work pretty well.  It
> can display many kinds of PNG files above the login prompt.
[snip again]

Somebody beat you to it, at least partially.  SuSE 7.3's default behavior
after initial installation is to use the VESA framebuffer at either 1024x768
or 800x600 (forget which) and an 80x25 black-on-white window for tty1.  The
actual console is off-center on the screen, down and to the right about 10%,
and the space between the edges of the console and the screen border is filled
with a custom graphics frame featuring green chameleons or something. 
tty2-tty6 are just like the old-school VESA framebuffer consoles.

This felt wrong on many levels, and the behavior apparently requires a kernel
patch as it didn't happen after I upgraded the kernel to the official 2.4.16
tree.  I didn't check to see how they did it, or whether it's possible to
customize the frame graphics they used.

If this does everything in userspace and is easily customizable (and
documented at least partially) though, it will beat SuSE's solution for many
users.  Now if I could only get nVidia's evil binary drivers to play happily
with the virtual consoles, I'd be set....


-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
"I backed up my brain to tape, but tar says the tape contains no data...."