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- - Where did my Xmas penguins go? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/suse-opensuse-60/where-did-my-xmas-penguins-go-512827/)

Where did my SUSE Bootsplash Xmas penguins go?

Bit of a horror! :eek:

When I installed 10.2, it had a cute animated bootsplash with snow and penguins. I had a X crash and did ctrl+alt+backspace and when it came back the penguins were gone, and I am back to the standard blue Suse bootsplash.

If anyone has time between last minute shopping and knows what happened, please help. It was proving to be a huge selling point for people I'm trying to convert from M$.

Your bootsplash is probably still there, but the configuration that called it has reverted to the default. Here is a link to a HOWTO to try to repair that situation.

http://wiki.suselinuxsupport.de/wikk...tSplashScreens

Thanks. I'll try that.

Actually if I understood correctly the xmas grub theme is something like a eastern egg. It will be shown almost randomly.

Yes, the penguins also have shown up randomly for me. Since my installation of SuSE 10.2 a few days ago, I have not seen them since.

u really miss them:D
on my pc they are random too.can i make somehow to see only penguins?or can i choose other animation??

I still haven't found where they are hiding, but the penguins just came back again?

But more weirdness. In the /boot/grub folder is a succession of nested /boot & /boot/grub folders. Seems to be about 40+, all with the same time stamp, and contents. Every time I open one there's another inside like infinitely recursive Russian dolls!

It is random. However it does increase in frequency as you near christmas. It is now appearing every time I boot up the computer.

I have yet to find out where they live on the boot screen

But they are living on and running around my desktop:cool:

Install "xpenguins" then you can have them when ever you want them..

Found in games, amusement every time you click on xpenguins you get 10 more:)

Found the solution

I found the solution. First, I realized that the penguins showed up more at CHristmas, so I changed my date. That brought them back so I could get my info.
To make them permanent, you have to open the file /boot/message with cpio. It's safer to copy it to an empty directory before you work with it. cpio is a command line only tool. Once "message" is extracted, edit the file "gfxboot.cfg" Just change the two instances of -1 to 100 so they are there 100% of the time.
Then just re-compress it with cpio and overwrite the original file. Figuring out how to use cpio was the only hard part because I am still somewhat of a newbie. But it wworked well for me and the penguins are back for good.

i quite liked the penguins when it was around christmas but they still popup now and again which annoys me if it isn't christmas. How do i set it so they only come on say from december 20th - december 31st?

Configuring the animated penguins in SUSE Xmas bootspalsh

Decided to have the penguins permanent for December & January, so I had to learn how to use cpio. Not easy, as the info & man pages are comprehensive but not helpful! :scratch:

Remember cpio must be run from the command line as root

After some experimentation I ended up with this Howto:

1. First make a new directory /boot/temp, and copy the message file into it from /boot.

2. Open a terminal as root and:

Code:

cd /boot/temp

3. Use cpio to extract the contents:

Code:

cpio -i < message

You will see something like this:

Code:

florence:/boot/temp # ls -l

total 1148

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99 112353 Dec 24 11:01 16x16.fnt

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  61152 Dec 24 11:01 back.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  3093 Dec 24 11:01 en.hlp

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  1543 Dec 24 11:01 en.tr

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  3281 Dec 24 22:06 gfxboot.cfg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  84289 Dec 24 11:01 init

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      6 Dec 24 11:01 lang

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99      3 Dec 24 11:01 languages

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 689152 Dec 24 22:08 message

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99    229 Dec 24 11:01 pabout.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  39431 Dec 24 11:01 panim.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  29857 Dec 24 11:01 panim_a.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  87451 Dec 24 11:01 pback.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  2124 Dec 24 11:01 phead.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1  99  99  1719 Dec 24 11:01 timer_a.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    312 Dec 24 11:01 translations.en

4. Open gfxboot.cfg with your favourite text editor & find these two lines near the top in the [base] section.

Code:

; penguin theme likelihood (in percent, -1 = auto)

penguin=-1

The animated penguin screen will appear at random with penguin=-1. You can set it to anything from 0 to 100. With penguin=0 they will never appear, and with penguin=100 they will be permanent.

5. At the bottom of the file find this section:

Code:

[boot]

; show welcome animation

welcome=0

; beep when menu is ready

beep=0

and change welcome=0 to welcome=1 if it isn't already. If you want a beep to indicate when the menu is loaded, set beep=1.

6. Once you save the file with the changes, you use cpio to re-archive it using this command string:

Code:

find . | cpio -o > message

This command makes a list of all the files in the current directory (/boot/temp) sends the list to cpio, and has it archive them to the file message.

Easy! ;)

I've lost most of my command line skills, so it took several hours of reading the man & info files and then Googling for cpio+usage. Enjoy. :cool:

PS Is this worth making into a Sticky?

It might be worth submitting as a tutorial. Just add Suse to your title.

I've edited the original title, & the "Howto" post, and added tags to the first post. How do I submit this as a Tutorial? Can I do it through the feedback form?