Dear Simon Glass,
In message CAPnjgZ3rNhvL98JEOPV=90u-Wr3iEqs8QgqYaz=bOohRFRJeEA@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
The problem is that a major purpose of the GUIs is to allow installing an OS from a USB stick/SD card, since the OS may have become corrupted and unbootable. We have looked at keeping around a separate OS image for this (e.g. in an available disk partition), but so far that hasn't proved practical since that itself can be fairly easily overwritten and we then have a doorstop.
The less fancy, the better, but consumers have certain expectations that force us to make some efforts...there is already a single font in U-Boot, but it's not good enough for multi-language pretty displays unfortunately.
Why don't you load and start a small recovery system from the USB stick then? I don't see why you need a GUI to do that. This could be mostly made automatic.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk