Graphical boot
 

In an ongoing :) effort to get Linux 'prettier' for my sister, I would like to have a graphical bootup, preferably with an animation and/or progress bar option. She is running Slackware 10.1 and booting from LILO, though I am willing to try GRUB. Your advise on the matter....

Btw I have only a few days experience with Linux, so please don't over-complicate things. Thank you!

Well I've got news for ya and it's all bad ;) To get a graphical boot you need either bootsplash or fbsplash/gensplash. And it's not the easiest thing in the world. To use bootsplash you'll need to patch your kernel source with the bootsplash patch available from www.bootsplash.de and recompile your kernel, enabling the require config options. Then you'll need to install splashutils and download a theme or two to work with, sound like fun? It's really not as bad as it sounds :)

Here's a link that looks like it steps you through it if you have swaret installed. The kernel he's referring to is pretty old but the instructions should remain very similar for newer versions, you'll just need to find out if the newer love patches have bootsplash in them and if not, find a patchset that does.

I have better news for you and it's all good.

Take a stroll over to the slackware sub-conf and read through Shilo's 'How I do it all post'. He covers everything there including how to do this so that slack boots to a nice GUI everytime without changing from lilo