should show some kind of indication of system being alive during livesession boot

Letting the logo pulsate would be much less intrusive at this stage, would this be fine for you?

Mat T says to have the logo pulsate in 3 second cycles between 100% and 50% of opacity.

sounds great, any kind of indication of "it's alive!" is fine :)

Oliver Grawert [2009-09-29 17:15 -0000]:
> sounds great, any kind of indication of "it's alive!" is fine :)

A couple of Brits dancing and singing "I'm not quite dead yet!"? :-)

/me cheerfully remembers Spamalot

I added the support for logo pulsating to usplash bzr now. You can either start usplash with --pulse-logo to start it right away, or do usplash_write PULSELOGO to start it afterwards.

So casper now needs to do either.

usplash 0.5.40 uploaded, waiting in unapproved for karmic thawing after beta.

I'm not a casper guru, so I'm trying to find an appropriate place in casper where to put this. casper doesn't start usplash itself, so it needs to use "usplash_write PULSELOGO". It should be done soon after usplash is started, so the usual scripts in casper-bottom are a bit late.

Is it appropriate to put it into scripts/casper, right at the start of mountroot(), where the usplash timeout is also set?

Thanks!

Either that, or else a new init-top script that has OPTION=USPLASH and
PREREQ="usplash". In the latter case you'd need to explicitly check that
[ "$BOOT" = casper ].

I suspect putting it in scripts/casper:mountroot is probably neatest, at
least for the moment; it's not quite as early as possible but it will
probably do OK.

This bug was fixed in the package usplash - 0.5.40

---------------
usplash (0.5.40) karmic; urgency=low

  * libusplash.c: Move waiting out of dim_logo() into fade_logo(), so that we
    can use dim_logo() for asynchronous pulsating as well.
  * libusplash.{h,c}: Add pulse_logo() which lets the logo pulsate another
    step, using dim_logo(). If pulsating is enabled, call it in usplash.c's
    do_animate() function, which is already called regularly through a timer.
  * usplash.c: Do not fade out logo when pulsating is enabled, since it looks
    ugly (fade out always starts at full brightness). Doing this more smoothly
    requires some reorganization/merging of the fade/dim logic and state
    keeping.
  * usplash.c: Add option --pulse-logo which enables logo pulsating right from
    the start. Document it in usplash.8.
  * usplash.c: Add new command PULSELOGO which starts logo pulsing. Document
    it in usplash_write.8, and also refer to it in usplash.8. (LP: #438762)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:32:38 +0200

This bug was fixed in the package casper - 1.198

---------------
casper (1.198) karmic; urgency=low

  * scripts/casper: Send PULSELOGO usplash command at startup. (LP: #438762)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:51:07 +0200

Apparently something here is still broken. When I boot the live system on the dailies now, it starts with the fading-in ubuntu logo, but then immediately goes black and stays that way.

Tom, don't just close bugs without explanation. This is still broken on the current live CDs.

This seem to work with today's live now. Please complain here if it still fails for you.

For the record, Mario filed a new bug 448988 for cases where it does not work yet.