My dream is that we make an environment for laptop users as friendly as Linux or OSX. I'm interested in the feasibility of changing the "chattiness" of the default terminal (ttyv0) so that users get to a Unix login after a minimum of diagnostic data and, after login, that it stay free of diagnostic data intrusions.
Aside: Pace. I have seen some posts preaching the Good Word of "why you should care about diagnostic data." I get it. Really, I do. Years of sysadminning have not gone wasted on me. But I feel like that's something we should allow users to /choose/ to step down or silence -- and I think that's OK.
I would appreciate if anyone could confirm that I've done all the silencing that's possible under the current design.
1. I think the initial chattiness is reasonably covered by the boot_mute="YES" option great feature. Are there more flags like this?
2. After the splash screen disappears, there are still a number of "Autoloading module..." messages, diagnostic data from the wifi system, file mounting, etc. These are all scary for some users. Is it possible to mute these in a way that doesn't require multiple one-off edits to rc agents? See an approach: [1]
3. Finally, in ttyv0, ongoing system diagnostic data are printed to the screen in a way that's jarring/frustrating/baffling. I know this is not the case for other ttys, but if a "clean" experience is sought, couldn't that be configurable? Other forum posts suggest this is a non-issue if you log your non-root user in on some other VT. But this "change to a different tty" workaround isn't entirely hermetic. For example, on my machine when I move to ACPI state S3, I see the tty swap to ttyv0 and then things go to sleep. When I wake the machine back up, I'm in the ttyv0 again and then as the rc.resume action finishes, my state is re-loaded and I'm moved back to the "user" tty I was in when I went to S3. It's just not...smooth. Any ideas on how to hide this.
I feel like this post is going to be controversial, so let me say the majesty and scope of FreeBSD is staggering. I believe we can share its excellence with more folks if they're not jarred in their expectations by having bluetooth wire data text slapping itself in the middle of their screen. So thanks to all who made this moment possible.
Thanks for any insights,
Steven
[1]: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot
Aside: Pace. I have seen some posts preaching the Good Word of "why you should care about diagnostic data." I get it. Really, I do. Years of sysadminning have not gone wasted on me. But I feel like that's something we should allow users to /choose/ to step down or silence -- and I think that's OK.
I would appreciate if anyone could confirm that I've done all the silencing that's possible under the current design.
1. I think the initial chattiness is reasonably covered by the boot_mute="YES" option great feature. Are there more flags like this?
2. After the splash screen disappears, there are still a number of "Autoloading module..." messages, diagnostic data from the wifi system, file mounting, etc. These are all scary for some users. Is it possible to mute these in a way that doesn't require multiple one-off edits to rc agents? See an approach: [1]
3. Finally, in ttyv0, ongoing system diagnostic data are printed to the screen in a way that's jarring/frustrating/baffling. I know this is not the case for other ttys, but if a "clean" experience is sought, couldn't that be configurable? Other forum posts suggest this is a non-issue if you log your non-root user in on some other VT. But this "change to a different tty" workaround isn't entirely hermetic. For example, on my machine when I move to ACPI state S3, I see the tty swap to ttyv0 and then things go to sleep. When I wake the machine back up, I'm in the ttyv0 again and then as the rc.resume action finishes, my state is re-loaded and I'm moved back to the "user" tty I was in when I went to S3. It's just not...smooth. Any ideas on how to hide this.
I feel like this post is going to be controversial, so let me say the majesty and scope of FreeBSD is staggering. I believe we can share its excellence with more folks if they're not jarred in their expectations by having bluetooth wire data text slapping itself in the middle of their screen. So thanks to all who made this moment possible.
Thanks for any insights,
Steven
[1]: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot
