This project is about hacking and pushing further an engine called BPAEngine written in plymouth that enable people to develop better boot screens without much effort. Having those new boot screens in our distributions would be great.
Plymouth is a "basic" scripting language for developing boot screens (See some Fedora examples running). Our openSUSE distributions have their own plymouth themes packaged on the branding-openSUSE package. And in my opinion they are very basic..., just a dot moving in 3 positions with the nice background and a logo.
I already have started to develop the engine, just check it out on the github repo. I took an OOP pattern (as possible as it can be developed in Plymouth) and based on concepts of gaming engines out there.
This project is part of:
Hack Week 15
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Create DRM drivers for VESA and EFI framebuffers by tdz
Description
We already have simpledrm for firmware framebuffers. But the driver is originally for ARM boards, not PCs. It is already overloaded with code to support both use cases. At the same time it is missing possible features for VESA and EFI, such as palette modes or EDID support. We should have DRM drivers for VESA and EFI interfaces. The infrastructure exists already and initial drivers can be forked from simpledrm.
Goals
- Initially, a bare driver for VESA or EFI should be created. It can take functionality from simpledrm.
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Let's revisit our existing openSUSE welcome app.
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Some things that I recently wanted to address were EOL and possibly upgrade notification.
I've already done some experiments with mint welcome app, but not sure if it's better than the existing one.
There is also a PR to rework existing app https://github.com/openSUSE/openSUSE-welcome/pull/36 (this should be considered as an option too)
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Resources
Reddit discussion about the best welcome app out there.
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Create a DRM driver for VGA video cards by tdz
Yes, those VGA video cards. The goal of this project is to implement a DRM graphics driver for such devices. While actual hardware is hard to obtain or even run today, qemu emulates VGA output.
VGA has a number of limitations, which make this project interesting.
- There are only 640x480 pixels (or less) on the screen. That resolution is also a soft lower limit imposed by DRM. It's mostly a problem for desktop environments though.
- Desktop environments assume 16 million colors, but there are only 16 colors with VGA. VGA's 256 color palette is not available at 640x480. We can choose those 16 colors freely. The interesting part is how to choose them. We have to build a palette for the displayed frame and map each color to one of the palette's 16 entries. This is called dithering, and VGA's limitations are a good opportunity to learn about dithering algorithms.
- VGA has an interesting memory layout. Most graphics devices use linear framebuffers, which store the pixels byte by byte. VGA uses 4 bitplanes instead. Plane 0 holds all bits 0 of all pixels. Plane 1 holds all bits 1 of all pixels, and so on.
The driver will probably not be useful to many people. But, if finished, it can serve as test environment for low-level hardware. There's some interest in supporting old Amiga and Atari framebuffers in DRM. Those systems have similar limitations as VGA, but are harder to obtain and test with. With qemu, the VGA driver could fill this gap.
Apart from the Wikipedia entry, good resources on VGA are at osdev.net and FreeVGA