unity-design team mailing list archive

[Lasse Havelund <lasse@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

I was asked to bring this suggestion to this list by Martin Albisetti --
after a recent blog post I made[1], suggesting that we get around to
implementing a graphical boot loader, I've received a _lot_ of positive
feedback, which has led me poking around various IRC channels and people
for suggestions as to how we can get started on this, either for Lucid,
or Lucid+1 (the latter is what was my original intention--depending on
the functionality we need, the release schedule, the LTS status of
Lucid, etc.)---I'll let others be the judge of this.

My primary rationale is that GRUB is a core component of Ubuntu, and one
of the last parts requiring a more 'human' touch, making it more
approachable for new users. GRUB is the first thing a user will see when
they boot their system, and we want it to give a good impression.

GRUB2 now has experimental theme[2] capabilities, which makes it
(relatively) easy for us to actually create a design, and implement it
without too much of a hassle, as far as I understand it (IANAP[3]).

As far as I understand, though, the current implementation isn't
particularly flexible; having spoken to several good people in #grub,
I've been informed that several of my ideas aren't possible with the
current limitations of the system, i.e. only allowing for vertical menus
(which isn't necessarily a problem), flashy pseudo-png animations, or
anything like that, which, while not necessary, adds that tiny bit of
awesome to the final product.

Jo Shields (directhex) has already made a fairly decent implementation
using my mockups[4][5], which, while good-looking, don't counter the
problem I'm trying to highlight (see [1] for more information on that),
but acts as a very lovely proof-of-concept, which I definitely think we
can continue working with.

For now, however, I'd like to hear some thoughts. How far should we go
with this? Do we need amazing C hackers to start chipping away at
grub-upstream to mould it into being more flexible? Should we go for a
much simpler one? Should we aim at getting this into Lucid, or Lucid+1?
Or is this not relevant to Ubuntu at all?

I'm hoping to start some initial discussion now, and if it's decided
that this is something unsuitable for Lucid, but something we should
pursue for Lucid+1, to have further discussions about this at the next
UDS (which, God forbid, is somewhere near me this time).

I hope I haven't bored you all with this massive wall of text. Let me
know what you think.

[1] http://blog.lassehavelund.com/2010/grub-a-usability-hurdle-pt-2
[2] http://grub.gibibit.com/
[3] I Am Not A Programmer
[4] http://i.imgur.com/rL86m.png
[5] http://lassehavelund.com/~menza/grub-ubuntu3.tar.bz2

P.S.: This message was originally typed out several days ago, but
apparently wasn't sent. Apologies for this.

--
  .----.-.     Lasse Havelund
 /    ( o \    Official Ubuntu Member
'|  __ ` ||    lhavelund@xxxxxxxxxx
 |||  ||| -'   +45 6021 3890

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