Does anyone have considerable experience with GRUB and how the graphical display works in it? I have not had good fortune trying to find information on this topic?

My situation is the following:

I have three Harddisks and an OS on each:

1. experimental Harddisk for any OS I want to test or whatever
2. RedHat 8.0
3. Windows 2000

I tried installing Mandrake 9.0 on HD1 and didn't have good success, which is another issue, but I accidentally hurt my Grub installation and now finally have it working again except that now it doesn't display the splash image it just gives me black and white.

Anyone know the mechanism and what it might be?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Hi,

Grub configuration file is /boot/grub/menus.lst.
The option that define your splah image is
splashimage = (hdX,X)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

where hdX,X is the identification of your disk

splash.xpm.gz is the file of your image (xpm formated) that should be in 640x480 resolution and 14 colors. Gziped alternatively.

You can define other colors, like the bars or letters changing the following options:
color = 2
foreground = 3D FFFFFF
background = 3D 0C55C3
viewport 3 2 77 22

I hope this help's a little ...

I appreciate the help but I already basically have that stuff taken care of, but I didn't know some of the options you mentioned so thanks for that. I think I figured it out to some extent. I was installing Mandrake 9.0 when this problem with not displaying the splash image showed up after the installation. I think it's the difference in the two distributions RedHat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0 and how they package their particular GRUB loader. Anyways, I still would prefer the splash image to Mandrake's basic colors and boring look. It reminds me of the NT Bootloader which is nasty looking and of course typical packaging for Microsoft. I need to install the GRUB from RedHat back on my first disk's MBR, but I'm not quite sure how to do it yet without jumping through some hoops and possible ruining my current setup. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

From the partition that you have grub installed exec:

/usr/sbin/grub

install (hdX,X)/grub/stage1 (hdX) (hdX,X)/grub/stage2 0x8000 (hdX,X)/grub/menu.lst
quit


Where hdX,X or hdX is the location of your harddisk, like

hd0 is primary master
hd1 is secondary master
hd2 is primary slave
hd3 is secondary slave

the ,X are the number of your partition ...

How do I save my file as 14 colors.

I had a bmp from Windows, 640x480. Loaded under Gimp, saved as a Xpm but did not see where to save it as a 14 color Xpm.

Thanks

Hi,

You will need to click in Image -> Mode -> Indexed ( or ALT + I ), and will appear a box with the number of colors on the first line "Generate optimal pallete of colors", just change that number to 14 and save it.

see ya

Thanks Alot.