Created attachment 344777 [details]
Add "dcon-unfreeze" to default olpc.fth

Description of problem:
In Q2E30 the default behavior of OFW has changed and pretty boot has become the default. This means that one cannot see plymouth, rhgb or any other boot messages. There is no feedback on the boot progress because Fedora cannot show the XO's boot animation. Not even X gets shown once the XO stopped booting, one has to STRG+ALT+ERASE in order to see it.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
liveusb-creator-3.6.5-2.fc11.noarch.rpm 

Additional info:
Quote from Mitch Bradley:

You need to add the word "dcon-unfreeze" to olpc.fth .  You could add it 
after the existing "unfreeze", e.g.

   unfreeze  dcon-unfreeze

or it could be on a separate line; either will work.

What this does is to turn off "pretty boot".  The way that pretty boot 
works is that, just prior to loading the OS, OFW "freezes" the screen by 
invoking the DCON chip's "hold the last display frame, ignoring new 
information" function.

In older OFW versions, pretty boot was used only when security was 
enabled, thus only for signed OLPC OS images, but as of Q2E30 we bowed 
to pressure from a few vocal proponents of pretty-boot-everywhere and 
made it the default.  I knew that, as a result, I was going to have to 
deal with problems like yours forever afterward, and that has turned out 
to be the case :-(.  I tried to explain the "unfreeze dcon-unfreeze" 
magic to the people I knew who were making alternate distributions, but 
it has proven impossible to get the message through to all of them.

The distinction between "unfreeze" and "dcon-unfreeze" is that 
"dcon-unfreeze" unfreezes the display right now, whereas "unfreeze" 
prevents the last-second "jump to the loaded OS" code from refreezing at 
that later instant.  (Last-instant refreeze is what used to happen, 
letting you see the "boot:" messages, but that wasn't pretty enough for 
some people, so I had to institute "early freeze" to eliminate all text 
unless olpc.fth does the "dcon-unfreeze" thing too.