Splash Screens in GTK

[Jeff Evarts <jdeassoc earthlink net>]

I'm curious. What's the best way to make a "splash page"
using gtk? I'm talking about the thing you see with a lot of
programs that splashes a bitmap up while the rest of the program
is getting it's act together.

        As far as I can tell, the best (only?) way to get the
expose events served is to call gtk_main, which doesn't have
a "run until X queue is empty" mode, so you're stuck with putting
the rest of your initialization into an idle function.

        Alternatively, you could fork and create a child process
and a socket back to the main one. The child owns the splash page
and has it's own gtk_main loop, while the parent continues on.

        Neither of these seems QUITE right (it's hard to build
an idle function that is fine-grained enough to keep the X updates
from looking choppy, but the second process' overhead might also
be awkward.

        So how have *you* guys done it?

-Jeff