[Glug-nith-discuss] Make your own GRUB Splash Screen

[arjunsha]

Hi all,

I just reinstalled Archlinux on my old (and almost dying) notbook in a
bid to improve performance with a reiserfs root partition.

Along the way, I also cleaned up my GNOME configs etc. Just to start
afresh. And since arch neither has a GRUB Splash screen nor supports
one (they use an unpatched vanilla GRUB), and since I wanted one this
time, I went ahead and made my own after googling.

To bore you no further, here's how to make your own GRUB splash:

0. Open up your favourite image in GIMP (install GIMP if you don't
have it already).

1. Resize/cut it to 640*480 size ONLY (you can navigate to the
"Image->Canvas Size" or "Image->Scale Image" menu options in GIMP,
depending on your need)

3. Select the "Image->Mode->Indexed" menu option, and select 'Generate
optimum palette' in the dialog box. Set 'Maximum number of colours' to
14 ONLY (yes, only 14 colours are allowed), and click on 'Convert'

4. Save the file in '.xpm.gz' format (Lets say 'splash.xpm.gz') (It
will be automatically gzipped by GIMP :) )

5. Copy it to your "/boot/grub/" directory as root. (so it's path is:
'/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz')

6. Open up '/boot/grub/menu.lst' as root.

7. If you have a seperate /boot partition then enter the following:

splashimage /grub/splash.xpm.gz

If you don't have a /boot partition, then enter the following instead:

splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

in a seperate line, somewhere in the beginning itself (before the OS
entries come)

8. Save and close the file.

9. Reboot and enjoy!

If you use Arch like me, you'll have to patch and reinstall GRUB, so
I'll leave that out here. If you want to know how, ask on the list, or
google ;)

Arjun