Hi again,

So, I'm in the process of building a liveCD for my customised Slackware install, and have had some pretty good success so far, with only a few minor glitches that have more or less been worked out.

Insofar the CD is almost complete except for a few things that need to be finalised. One thing that I am having trouble with at the moment is getting my bootsplash to work on the liveCD. The CD (or DVD in my case) works fine, it's booting, loading, and working all from a live environment, which is good news. I just need to incorporate a bootsplash and I'll be nearly done. I have bootsplash working wonderfully on the installed HDD, startup and shutdown screens, progressbar, and all that fun stuff. I just need to find out a way to throw that into the live environment.

So, does anyone out there know how to incorporate a bootsplash into a LiveCD? I'm running the 2.6.24 kernel and the 6.2.0 version of LiveCD on Slackware 12.

In short:
* I have bootsplash running on my HDD
* I have my LiveCD(DVD) booting and working
* Help with how to incorporate bootsplash into the live environment is needed (Such as config file locale, command strings, etc... ).

Any assistance or pointers you could supply would be greatly appreciated ^_^

Cheers,
- Smurfed

I'm not familiar with LiveCD, so this may be non sequitur, but in general, the things that can interfere with bootsplash are the /proc file system and initrd and, of course, the lilo config if you use lilo.

The /proc file system needs to be mounted read-write to get bootsplash running, I'm not sure if that happens when using LiveCD.

You have bootsplash with progress bars already running on the HD so you must know that the /etc/rc.d/rc.? files need to be modified to update the progress bar, and that the initrd.gz file needs the bootsplash image embedded.

I also haven't tried the 2.6.24 patch for bootsplash, but again, you have it running on the HD (with the same kernel, I assume) so you must have the right options enabled there (the VESA framebuffer, especially).

Updating the initrd is quite different in the 2.6 kernels than it is with the older ones... the outdated instructions for bootsplash say to simply append the image to the existing initrd.gz file. That doesn't work for me at all with 2.6 kernels, I make an initrd after a kernel update with:

cd /boot
rm initrd.gz
rm -rf initrd-tree

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.23.16 -f ext3 -r /dev/hdc1

Modify the above for your kernel and root device -- also, I recommend not configuring the kernel file system support as modules, I get problems doing that with SATA drives. However, if you do have that sort of kernel configuration, you can specify the file system module in the mkinitrd command line by adding a -m ext3 (or whatever file system you use).

Once that is done add the image to the initrd-tree directory with (for example):

splash -s -f /etc/bootsplash/themes/current/config/bootsplash-1024x768.cfg > /boot/initrd-tree/bootsplash

Then run mkinitrd again with no command line options to create the initrd.gz file.

Re-run lilo, if you use it. Make sure you have a compatible vga line in that file (791 works well for me).

Check dmesg after boot if bootsplash doesn't work, it should have some pertinent information.

If all else fails, you can try falling back to the old method of simply appending the bootsplash image to the initrd.gz file (create an initial directory as above, then run mkinitrd with no options, skipping embedding the bootsplash image, then run splash again, but append it to the initrd.gz file).

Hope this helps...

Thanks for your input raconteur. I haven't actually worked on it since the original post (a busy weekend of paying attention to something other than Linux for once... )

But I'm back at work now and am just about to give it another crack. Hopefully all goes well this time.

Cheers for the advice,
- Smurfed

Alright, I finally have bootsplash working on my LiveCD 8)

All I had to do was cat my pre-existing bootsplash file into the initrd created by the LiveCD scripts

cat /path/to/bootsplash >> /path/to/livecd/initrd.gz

Cheers,
- Smurfed