Most users will probably look at this unusual boot animation tweak and wonder why in the world anyone would do this, but developers and Linux lovers will nostalgically giggle and cheer. Rather than having boring pre-recorded boot animations, why not see the actual boot messages fly by, akin to booting a Linux machine?

Chainfire, one of xda's moderators, cooked up a boot animation replacement called live dmesg boot ani that does just that - now instead of your carrier's logo, you can see all kinds of geeky boot goodness your device has been secretly spitting out all along. The program requires root (there is no doubt that it would be impossible without it) and is available in the Market for $2.83 Update: the author emailed in to let us know he knocked the price down to $1.99.

Have a look at the blurry demo and then hit up a sample of the data you will expect to see (it's an excerpt of the dmesg boot log from the Linux box that powers AP):

... NET: Registered protocol family 17

Using IPI No-Shortcut mode

ACPI: (supports S0 S1 S4 S5)

Initalizing network drop monitor service

Freeing unused kernel memory: 232k freed

Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 403k

Time: acpi_pm clocksource has been installed.

input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input0

input: ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse as /class/input/input1

ohci_hcd: 2005 April 22 USB 1.1 'Open' Host Controller (OHCI) Driver (PCI)

USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v3.0

SCSI subsystem initialized

VMware PVSCSI driver - version 1.0.1.1

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 51

pvscsi: using 64bit dma

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:03:00.0 to 64

pvscsi: using MSI

scsi0 : VMware PVSCSI storage adapter rev 2, req/cmp/msg rings: 8/8/1 pages, cmd_per_lun=64

VMware PVSCSI rev 2 on bus:3 slot:0 func:0 host #0

Vendor: VMware Model: Virtual disk Rev: 1.0

Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02

SCSI device sda: 207848970 512-byte hdwr sectors (106419 MB)

sda: Write Protect is off

sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00

sda: cache data unavailable

sda: assuming drive cache: write through

SCSI device sda: 207848970 512-byte hdwr sectors (106419 MB)

sda: Write Protect is off ...

The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch

Thanks, Jorrit