Re: Progress bar on startup

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Damien Covey <djcovey softhome net> writes:

> Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> This is the sort of behaviour that I'm talking about.  I think that
> once a user is greeted with the GDM that they shouldn't have to wait
> for Gnome to load.  Obviously when someone starts their machine to an
> X environment they are most likely to be using Gnome.  Perhaps some
> sort of *easy* way for a user to decide whether or not they want to
> "pre-load" gnome on boot?  If they are starting init 5, then preload,
> otherwise dont preload?

Woah!  Slow down there.  I'm proposing changing the behaviour of the
splashscreen, not randomly preloading libraries. (-;  Speeding up
logging in is a fine idea - but this is not intended to fix that.

My observations were that:

 * A significant amount of the time logging in is spent loading
   libraries[1].

 * The apps initially started by the session manager all register
   themselves at roughly the same time.

 * The remainder of the apps don't have icons, and tend to all appear
   simultaneously as well.

The user visible effect of this is that:

 * The splashscreen appears and sits around for a bit

 * A bunch of icons suddenly appear as nautilus/the panel/g-s-d all
   startup.

 * (optionally) A bunch of '?' foot icons suddenly appear if I've saved
   the session with other apps.

The proposed change was to replace the random icons with a generic,
non-stateful progress meter, or if we want to be less distracting, just
put up a splash.  It's worth noting that neither WinXP or MacOSX have
splashscreens right now.  They just start logging in with a little
animated 'hourglass'[2] cursor.

Perhaps this needs a GEP. (-:
-Jonathan

[1] Still unsubstantiated.  If I log out and log back in immediately
    (killing both gconfd and bonobo-activation) I log in much more
    quickly the second time.  This is where my instinct comes from.
    It'd be good to make a serious effort to profile this.  I know
    someone at Wipro did something like this a while ago.  What happened
    as a result?

[2] MacOSX has some weird rotating circle, but that's neither here nor
    there.