[lokisetup] Thoughts

[Stéphane Peter]

> On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 18:51, Chunky Kibbles wrote:
> > Two things;
> > First, It would be really nice if you could provide lots of logo-y
> > type bits for varying bit depths; my laptop is running at 8-bit, and
> > half the funky install things out there look FUGLY
> While this may be useful for you and others that happen to have crappy
> displays, I don't see it as being important to the demographic that
> installers like _setup are targeted for (the non hardcore). Unless 
> people start giving into alpha/mips/m86k trolls :)
> I think they'll also think that the more serious problem would be that
> whatever is being installed doesn't run/look right at 8bpp, rather
than
> the inconsequential image? When the day comes that 8bpp is an
important
> target for somebody writing an installer, it would probably just be
> easier for him to make a less interesting graphic then work around
> whatever unsupported kludge _setup would have. (Unless that is, it
> becomes part of the All Singing, All Dancing, new and improved _setup
> 2.0 now with e-mail sorting.)

Well Chunky does have a point... Right now one of the biggest reason I
am still working in this project is because I need it to work on a
variety of UNIX systems (not only Linux). And of these systems, you
would be surprised to see how many are still using legacy 8-bit X11
servers. Either way, you have to account for the possibility that people
will run setup on lower-end machines. Hell, else we would not even need
to have a text installer !

> Detecting bit-depth in and of itself seems like it would just be
another
> unportable kludge. Unless there's an easy way to do it that works on
the
> platforms that _setup runs on now, and ones that we'd like it to work
on
> in the future.

Actually GTK does most of the job anyway. It will convert the pixmap and
do the X11 colormap allocation, etc. So choosing a picture with less
colors might just do the trick for now. But of course this often means
that the logo looks quite fugly, as Chunky was initially complaining.

> But I'd still like to see it in anyway, especially if it's not a
kludge.

Maybe for 2.0, but such a change would be quite easy to do anyway (and
not kludgy, GDK exposes visual information).

-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.