Hi,

I have compiled grub-0.97 with graphics.diff patch to add support of the splashimage in stage2. It compiled and I can now have access to the splashimage setting *but* it won't shown anything on the grub screenie. What could be wrong ? Is there something I should now to see/display an image ? How can I be sure my grub has really the splashimage feature ?

Thank you very much

You also have to specify the splash screen in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/grubsplash.html

---------------------------
Steve Stites

Yes I already did. All is ok except that it would not display the splash

So there is nothing you can do to help to have a small dose of eye candy ? :/

You don't say what patch you used... Where from? It's quite possible it's not working because the support for it still isn't there. I've converted a FC grub rpm with rpm2tgz before and it worked just fine on Slackware. Something to think about anyway.

Long long ago it was needed to patch the kernel. Don't know about these days.

Also, make sure your pixmap is in the correct format. IIRC, it should be a 14-color, compressed (with gzip), xpm file.

I would like to modify the stock SlackBuild script (located in extra) with this patch. I would be grateful for a link to this file.

(Hey, if lilo in Slackware now has a splash image, why not grub? )

Thanks.

Okay, this is a little earlier than I was going to upload this stuff, but since you ask about it, I decided to upload some of the patches that I use for grub-0.97.
I've been running a version that uses these(except for the 256-byte inode) for quite a long time now without any problems.

I actually have several patched versions of grub, but some of the changes are really too 'wild' for most Slacker types. Still this set is very stable and useful without being *so* intrusive.
There are several graphics patches out there -this one has the best balance of features and includes patches to the docs. This version was originally done over at SuSE (IIRC) and was also used in Mandrake. It not only gives you the splash capability, but alos lets you resize the 'viewport' -that is the rectangle where the text entries show up.

here's a list of the patches:
01-cvs-sync.diff
02-splashimage.diff
03-xpmjunk.diff
04hidden-menu-tweak.diff
05-set-root.diff
06-ntfs.diff
07-256byte-inode.diff

I recommend that you use at least the cvs-sync diff, since the graphics diff is supposed to be applied after it. The cvs-sync patch is from debian and applies changes made by the grub developers after the release of 0.97. It's pretty small.
The xpm-junk diff simply tries to ignore extra data at the beginning of xpm files.
The set-root diff is one of several that I use which come from the grub4dos version of grub. The ntfs diff is from the same source. I have also used some of the other interesting diffs for grub4dos, but the others are quite hard to integrate with most other patches. The 256-byte inode diff is new and is being used by Slackware. I also have a whole bunch of other patches which fix gcc-4.x and other compiler warnings and security problems which were never integrated into the official branch.

I have also uploaded the slackware.xpm.gz splash screen that I use, and my grub menu.lst file. The menu.lst file contains some pretty good notes about how to use the viewport settings as well as setting up the font and background colors.

I hope you'll appreciate that I spent about 100 hours figuring out which patches would work, which should be used and adapting them so that they apply cleanly. Actually it was probably much longer than 100 hours! -GRUB=Gilbert Really Understates Bull...
Anyway, here's the link:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...-GRUB/patches/

I'm still using good ol' bootsplash with grub.

I haven't worked out a good patch for the 2.6.25 kernel, but the 2.6.24 patch from here works well.

Compile the kernel with the patch and enable the VESA framebuffer.
Don't enable your video card driver's framebuffer.

Advantages: All of my legacy themes were very easy to implement and work just fine.

Disadvantages: creating new themes is a bit tedious, as is editing the init scripts to set the progress bar, if enabled.

Details on request.

I'm interested in any themes you have -either for grub or bootsplash. I've collected a *lot* of material for both and am going to upload it all once I get it organized better.

I've even gotten bootsplash *animations* working!

I'll post them this weekend... the two I've created that I would consider sharing are a Space Odyssey theme that also plays a random or specified audio file from a list or directory specification. I've stored a collection of HAL's more creepy quotes for this one.

The other is a bit more generic and uses Slackware logos and no audio.

Did you get bootanim to trigger on fsck events? I never did get that to work well for me.

Rather than try to get animations tied to specific events, I just placed the commands in arbitrary spots during init. The animations pretty much 'hang up' anyway at some point -I think when mount is mounting all the non-root partitions in fstab. There are only a few seconds for them to work anyway, so I just have single flashing disk-drive. A simple 'spinner.mng' might be better. The shutdown animations are more interesting.
I've put together my own scripts and config files for controlling progressbar and animations -trying to keep things simple and flexible, although my routine for the animations tries to automatically place the animations by getting the size of the *.mng and the screen resolution and then doing some calculations in order to center the graphics. The idea was to be able to use a config setting to place animations top-left/center/right, bottom-left/center/right, but I haven't finished that -it just complicates things even more as well as slowing things down. But, I'm proud to have gotten it working -as far as I can tell, only SuSE and gentoo have ever had animations working.
I've done considerable work on the splashutils -there's big differences between the sources for the various distros -even when they have the same version number. SuSE had the most extensive modifications with new trigger mechanisms. They also incorporated mng support into the splash utility and used statically-compiled binaries for use in initrds or before mounting /usr. I worked out how to compile the hard-to-find libmng-mini which is used for that. SuSE had also made a couple of fixes to the kernel-patch for 2.4 series(which I usually use) which have version number 3.0.9 -everywhere else it was 3.0.7. As far as I can tell, 3.1.6 (for kernel-2.6) has never been added to or fixed, other than adapting it to newer kernel versions -which is not always trivial.
Anyway, please do share what you've come up with -we can pool our resources as there are still folks who like a bit of eye candy

Yeah, I tried all I could with bootanim and fbmngplay and was never really happy with either.
I'll be in touch...

Gilbert, thanks for posting this valuable information and the links.

Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful at obtaining a splash image. My image is good, the modified SlackBuild script compiled without errors, my menu.lst is updated, I performed a 'grub-install /dev/hda' to rebuild the stage2 file, grub boots fine, but no splash image.

Would you please post a link to y our SlackBuild script too?

Thanks.

P.S. I could not gunzip your slackware.xpm.gz file.