DoudouLinux CD » Migration to Squeeze

It seems Plymouth is using KMS to show during early boot. As there is currently no KMS driver for ATI video cards, plus many old/low brand video chipsets, this would mean that graphical boot would not succeed for these graphical configurations. We have to check this point but, if it is confirmed, we will have to use a backport of Splashy. See:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth

Backporting Splashy may not be so hazardous since the version has not evolved so much between Lenny and Wheezy: 0.3.13-5.1 against 0.3.13-3. At a first glance dependencies should just require that we backport splashy and libsplashy.

But what about support for Splashy in the live initramfs of Squeeze? Further investigations are required, certainly on the debian-live mailing list.

http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/splashy
http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/libsplashy1

It seems Plymouth is able to use a frame buffer interface as well, which may solve the case of video drivers not managed by KMS:

“For systems that don't have DRM mode settings drivers, plymouth falls back to text mode (it can also use a legacy /dev/fb interface).”

(copied from http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth)

We need a computer with an old video card since many Ati, Intel and nVidia cards are managed by KMS:

http://wiki.debian.org/KernelModesetting

I've just tested the framebuffer option for an nVidia card using the proprietary driver (which requires to disable the KMS compatible driver nouveau). This works fine, setting procedure is detailed on this page:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=60019

Note that it's no use changing the Grub resolution as indicated with GRUB_GFXMODE=1400x1050 in file /etc/default/grub. I don't know whether Plymouth can switch to framebuffer automatically when KMS isn't available or if we need to always use framebuffer.