We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.

There’s a new feature coming in Fedora 10 that is going to be very apparent to users trying the F10 Beta as their first introduction to the release. Plymouth uses X modesetting to drop the aging rhgb graphical boot engine in favor of a sleeker, faster system. However, the feature doesn’t work seamlessly for every video chipset. There are a few easy ways to overcome issues, fortunately.

We already have old Alpha documentation in the Beta release notes about Plymouth. That information needs to be updated to reflect the current state, including what Plymouth is and how it works, including expectations, known issues, and how to get out of any trouble it might cause. I’m sure this is planned as part of the general cleanup and update of the Beta release notes, but bears mentioning.

It might also be VERY useful to have a screencast of expected Plymouth behavior, possibly including some helpful narration on how to use the information in the previous bullet. So if you’re looking for a way to contribute a screencast that shows off a new feature and helps the user and testing community, here’s your opportunity.

Recall that the Beta is a release where we ask for much wider community testing. We should be prepared with answers to the questions users and testers are likely to ask when they try it. Having those answers in the Beta Release Notes already makes it easy to politely hand folks a URL for reference. The people helping in IRC #fedora and on fedora-list will appreciate it.

Cheers to James Laska for the screencast idea — I’m lucky I get to tap his brain, thanks to sitting next to him in my RH300 class this week.