Hack 7. Create a GRUB Boot Splash Background 
Create your own personalized boot splash
backgrounds for GRUB.
The default GRUB bootloader screen is rather
bland, but you can spice it up a little by creating your own custom
graphical background screen for the bootloader. GRUB imposes a number
of limitations on the image size and number of colors. It also
doesn't let you move the menu. The menu appears in a
rectangle near the top of the screen, with some text instructions
below the menu. This makes it relatively easy to create a graphical
background screen for the GRUB bootloader, because you can focus
primarily on making the bottom one-third of the screen interesting.
That is not to say you cannot use other areas of the screen, but you
should be careful. For example, don't make it
difficult to read the GRUB instructions by placing complex graphics
behind the text.
Here are the rather strict requirements for the image:
It must be sized at 640x480. It must be a .xpm format image file (gzip
compression is optional). It must contain no more than 14 colors.
Most people will cringe at the 14-color limit, but it is rather
amazing what you can do with just 14 colors. Cartoon images are quite
suitable for this narrow range of colors, and the narrow range of
colors to represent the official Linux penguin (Tux) works fine.
Find or create any image you want to try as a background for GRUB. If
you create an image yourself, it's best to create a
640x480 image and use as few colors as possible so that you
don't lose the fidelity of the image when you later
reduce it to 14 colors. Don't worry about using your
graphics editor to limit yourself to 14 colors, however. It is
possible to use the Gimp to reduce your image to use 14 colors, which
can be a good way of fine-tuning the results you want.
Here is what you need:
A graphics editor, such as the Gimp, if you want to create or modify
an image. You must install ImageMagick if it is not already installed. Nearly
all Linux distributions provide this on the install CD, and you can
use your preferred package manager to install it.
Suppose you have found or created the image
myimage.png. If you have ImageMagick installed,
all you need to do to prepare the image is log in as root and issue
these commands:
# convert myimage.png -colors 14 -resize 640x480 myimage.xpm
The convert command recognizes the extension
png and knows what format it must convert the
image from. It also recognizes the extension xpm
and knows what format to convert the image to. The -colors
14 switch reduces the number of colors in the image to 14.
If the image isn't already sized at 640x480, the
switch -resize 640x480 will do that for you.
Next, compress the image (this step is optional, but it saves disk
space, which is useful if you plan to install GRUB on a floppy disk
and use the floppy as your bootloader). Then copy the image to the
/boot/grub directory (if you have to mount the
/boot directory after starting up Linux, make
sure you have it mounted before you start copying files into the
/boot/grub subdirectory):
# gzip
myimage.xpm
# cp
myimage.xpm.gz
/boot/grub
Now use your favorite editor to add this line to your
grub.conf file:
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/myimage.xpm.gz
Reboot and you should see your image as the background for GRUB.
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