The first thing to do is to download the bootsplash patch. It can be found at the
Con Kolivas's kernel patchs page together with many more, but as of now we are only interested in bootsplash.
I won't explain here how to compile and patch a kernel, but I'll still give you a couple of tips:
Provided you have the kernel sources correctly installed in /usr/src/linux, copy the kernel patch bootsplash wherever you want (e.g. /usr/src) and decompress typing:
bunzip2 patch-1090_BS_0306020027_2.4.21-ck2.bz2
Then apply the patch from the /usr/src/linux directory:
patch -p1 < ../1090_BS_0306020027_2.4.21-ck2
Once the patch has been applied, proceed to configure the kernel with any of the four methods avaliable. You should activate the following settings (verbatim copy from
www.bootsplash.org)
- Go to "Console drivers" -> "Frame-Buffer support" and select "VESA VGA graphics console" (or possibly another framebuffer driver, if one is available for your graphics hardware) and select "Use splash screen instead of boot logo"
- Be sure to enable "Initial Ramdisk support" in "Block Devices"
Once done, all you have to do is to compile and install (or not yet) the new kernel.
Next step is to download a program named "splash", which will help us to create a initrd image which contains the necessary images and config files in order to boot properly with bootsplash, as obviously those can not be taken from hard disk at boot time.
Download it from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/stepan/bootsplash/rpm-sources/bootsplash/splashutils.tar.bz2. Decompress wherever you want (why not /usr/src again ;-) like this:
tar xvfj splashutils.tar.bz2
This will create a new directory named splashutils. cd into it and type:
make
A warning during the progress compilation will be shown, but it can simply be ignored. At this point we will have four binaries named fbresolution, getkey, progress and splash. These must be copied to /usr/local/bin so they can be found in the path, though we are only interested in the progress and splash files.
Now it's time to choose a theme for our splashscreen. I would recommend
Theme-Linux, as this will be the used one as the example for the rest of the article. Nevertheless you can choose any other that fits your taste. This theme has a progress bar and two modes:
- Verbose mode: All boot messages will be shown but with a translucid background image. Here you have a screenshot
- Silent mode: No message is shown, just an image with a progress bar. Be here an image
The best and easiest way to install a theme is to decompress in /etc/bootsplash/themes so we don't need to change anything in the config file.
At this point we have the following files in our system:
- /etc/bootsplash/themes/Linux/config/bootsplash-1024x768.cfg: It contains the boot configuration. A detailed description of it can be found here. We won't need to change anything in this file and the default values should be ok.
- /etc/bootsplash/themes/Linux/images/bootsplash-1024x768.jpg: this is the jpg image to be used in verbose mode.
- /etc/bootsplash/themes/Linux/images/silent-1024x768.jpg: this is the jpg image to be used in silent mode.
