No Plymouth for Ubuntu 9.04

Plymouth has now been evaluated for Ubuntu as a replacement to the current USplash. Sadly Plymouth is not going to be default in Ubuntu 9.04, but we may get PPAs for people that are interested in trying it out and have the supported hardware. At the Ubuntu Developer Summit it was suggested that Plymouth should be default by 9.10 - when all the drivers are ready and all critical problems are solved. Plymouth uses kernel mode-setting to provide a cleaner boot experience with minimal flickering of the display since the display only needs to set its mode once.

Here is the video of the UDS session where you can see the discussion process in more detail: http://videos.ubuntu.com/uds/jaunty/Desktop/2008-12-11/morning-post-break/00001.ogv


Looks like there's a lot of great thing to look forward to in Jaunty +1 (Ubuntu 9.10). Although both the facebrowser and Plymouth won't make it into Jaunty, there's no doubt that Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is moving fast forward.

No facebrowser for Jaunty

A Gobby document from the Desktop-GDM-upgrade session at UDS (witch is on it's third day today), showes that the facebrowser won't make it into Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04), but it's planned for Jaunty +1. You will be able to change the graphics and layouts of the facebrowser in the theme, but the behaviors will be hard coded.

Read more about the facebrowser here:
- GDM login experience
- Ubuntu's OpenGL face browser will bring bling to GDM"

The GDM login experience

A new GDM that uses OpenGL has been discussed and ideas have been thrown around. The project didn't make it into Intrepid, but hopefully we will see this new feature in the next Ubuntu release. It would help Ubuntu raise the bar and exceed the expectations. Of course this is again the work of Mirco Müller. Here is a link for the specs: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/GdmFaceBrowser

As you can see below, two previews have been released:



The login via GDM is meant to default to a face-browser allowing simple point-and-click user-selection. Only the password-entry will require the user to use the keyboard. It is still possible to type in the login-id instead of selecting the user with a mouse-click on her/his image. This will also cause the set of displayed user-faces to be filtered to the remaining completion-possibilities, thus rendering the remaining images larger and making the hit-area for a mouse-click even bigger.



The official name of it is "Login Experience" now, not "Face Browser" anymore.

Read Mirco Müller own blog post here: http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=163