Bootsplash patches anyone?

Hi,

I am new to this list but not to PXES... ran a nice customer project
this year, recycling 560+ old Siemens PCs :-)

Basically, pxes-0.8 runs fine on the machines. There are a couple of
issues, though.

The customer would like to add his own bootsplash to avoid seeing all
these kernel boot messages. "console=null" would be an option but seeing
nothing isn't actually a solution for Joe User. Since the PCs are rather
old and we have ISA network cards (3c509) we can't boot via PXE but I
added Etherboot boot roms. So far so good. Unfortunately, there is little
support for bootsplash in PXES outside of the PXE chain. The stock PXES
kernel does not support bootsplash per se. I'd patch the kernel source
but it seems it is not available from the PXES site. Or is there a way to
emulate PXE boot from an Etherboot boot rom? nbgrub doesn't do the trick
because it only supports a splash for GRUB itself but not for the
kernel. (By the way the stock PXES nbgrub does not contain the 3c509
driver...)

Has anybody done that before? Would it make sense to replace the base
files by those coming with Fedora core 1, at least the kernel and the
modules? I could use the SuSE 9.0 kernel and modules... ;-)

Another issue is the X server. We have old SiS6326 cards in all of the
machines, and the graphics performance with the ICA client is sloppy
at best (worse than with the ancient Windows95 which we are supposed to
replace :-( ). I'd like to try XFree86 4.4.0 or the X.org distribution but
this requires a major change in PXES (other and more shared libraries). Any
idea? 

ICA: Customers are now migrating to the ICA client 8.2 because the new
Citrix server supposedly has some new features. The hardcoded version
string should be replaced by a pxesconfig option IMHO. Collecting the
files could be handled dynamically...

TIA!

Ciao,
hm

-- 
With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once
build a nuclear balm?


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