It’s (not) Alright

Change the GRUB splash screen…

You might have been tired of the same old text mode GRUB splash screen in your Linux box. And maybe, you want to switch over from that (mostly) blue and black theme (???) to something better. Here is your chance then. You can add a background image like a wallpaper to your GRUB menu to make it more attractive. (Seriously, if you think that simple text menu is good, then you need to see a doctor).

So, what you will need is,

1. An image in 14 colors format.
2. Size of the image MUST be 640px X 480px.
3. Image must be in xpm format.

Now, I assume that you have gathered these things. If you are similar to me, that is too lazy to make your own image, I suggest you take a look here and get the image you want. If you have the xpm image, then the next thing to do is to compress it using gzip.

$>gzip filename.xpm

and you are done with the file. The next thing will be to copy that file to the /boot directory on your box. (This might require root permissions). After that, log on to root account. Then either open ‘/etc/GRUB.conf’ or open ‘/boot/grub/menu.lst’ file. Always make a backup before you continue.

Then add a line

splashimage=(hd0,0)/GRUB/filename.xpm.gz

In whichever file you opened. Remember, the part (hd0,0) is actually where your kernel is. So take a look at the menu.lst file to make sure you have entered the correct path.

Now reboot the machine. If all went correctly (which it should) then you will be greeted by your new GRUB menu. You might have guessed that this will not work on distributions that have a dedicated menu like openSUSE (still if you want, then there is a way to improve the menu in openSUSE also. Take a look). But for the rest of them, this will work as smooth as you would like. For a more detailed tutorial, visit this site.

Aditya Shevade

Posted in: GRUB, HowTo, Linux, System Configuration

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under GRUB, HowTo, Linux, System Configuration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.