Hint 396 - (5.0) Put a background picture on the boot screen

If you have a multi-boot system, the first screen you get on booting allows you to choose which OS you will boot into.

By default this screen is a plain dull color. But it is possible to jazz it up with a simple background picture as the screenshot below shows:

There are certain requirements on the background picture - it has to be displayed before an operating system is running, so it cannot be that fancy or large. It must have no more than 14 colors, and should be 640x480 in size. The picture should be simple so it does not obscure the boot choices, and it should have a contrasting background that shows up the white text.

You can download the image_magick utility from CNR (just get it from aisle pvdl-aisle for simplicity).
Then choose the image file (jpg, png, gif etc) that you want to use as the background (perhaps searching at google images), download it to your system and call it, e.g. "myfile.jpg".

Bring up a command window with Launch, Run command, "type "konsole" in the text field, then issue these commands in the command window that appears:

convert myfile.jpg -colors 14 -resize 640x480 myfile.xpm

gzip myfile.xpm

mv myfile.xpm.gz /boot/grub

The final step is to edit the GRUB bootloader's configuration file to tell it to use this background image. Make a backup copy of the file /boot/grub/menu.lst, then edit it and find the existing line:
splashimage=/boot/grub/bootsplash.xpm.gz
and change it to refer to your file:

splashimage=/boot/grub/myfile.xpm.gz

You will see the image on your next reboot.
You can search the internet and create your own image, or you can download and use the "tux swats windows moth" image shown above from http://afu.com/linux/tuxswat.xpm.gz

If you tried this tip and created your own background image, please share your image here in a follow-up post. (You can get an image to appear here by putting it on an image server, using the "Img" button when you post, then entering the URL of your picture on the image server. I like the free image server http://tinypic.com/ because they run Linux).

Peter
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Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2005 8:26 am Post subject:

Hi Peter
I have done as you instructed but how do I do the following as I cannot find any menu in the program apart from the right click which doesn't seem to have any way of inserting the commands.

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 6:38 am Post subject: Any Reply

Did you ever get a reply about where to enter the commands in the program from CNR??

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 6:54 am Post subject: Re: Any Reply

Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 4:49 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the tip, Peter. Here's my bootsplash screen. It's a keyboard with the Windows key replaced by the Linspire "L".

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