blank the screen

[mattvenn]

Hi,

I'm running with a composite tv on the pi. After boot, I want to wipe the screen of all the messages and the login prompt.

When I play a video, it plays fine, but after it finishes, all the messages and boot prompt are still there.

Any help appreciated!

Matt

[-rst-]

The command 'clear' (http://linux.die.net/man/1/clear) should get rid of most of the stuff...

[mattvenn]

thanks, but that only works for the screen I type it in.
I need to blank the composite output. I think this is displaying tty1
from /etc/initab:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty --noclear 38400 tty1

I haven't tried removing the getty lines from inittab yet, but it probably wouldn't help with blanking the boot messages.

Cheers,
Matt

[mattvenn]

after messing about with inittab, getty, fim, fbi I found the easy way to blank the screen: write zeros to the frame buffer directly.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fb0

[mattvenn]

though after the video finishes playing, the old text is still there!

[RaTTuS]

what are you wanting to do ?
boot up
do
clear
play a video
for ever?

or similar ....
fbset may or may not help

[mattvenn]

I'm wanting to have a blank screen, and when something happens, a video plays. When the video ends, back to blank screen.

I nearly have that, but with short flashes of boot messages in the back ground.

pseudo code:

while forever:
if something happens:
blank screen
play movie
blank screen

The flashes of the boot messages happen between the play movie and blank screen commands I suppose.

I'd rather leave the boot messages there because they're useful for debugging, but I suppose I can configure the pi to keep them quiet.

I'm trying to work out where linux is keeping the contents of the original frame buffer, so I can flush that too. Any ideas?

[mattvenn]

I set the console to be tty2 in /boot/cmdline.txt and that's one way to solve it.
Last thing would be nice to get rid of the flashing cursor!

[mattvenn]

cracked it!

1/- set kernel to log to console 2 (console=tty2 in /boot/cmdline.txt)

2/- wipe screen with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fb0

3/- turn off cursor with setterm -cursor off > /dev/tty1

Then I can play my movie whenever I get the trigger, and have a nice blank screen before and after, no flickers.

Matt

[Ruffio]

So the above instructions blanks the screen with black, but how to do it with other colours? White/blue...