Gfxboot (gfmenu) on Grub

[Townk]

Hi, I would like to know if there is anyone that already use or did use on the past, the gfxmenu patch of grub to get that grub appearence of SuSE 9 on Gentoo.

Any ideas, help or links to see are wellcome.

[] Townk

[Loci79]

I'm searching for that, too.

The sources I found here:
http://ftp.belnet.be/pub/mirror/ftp.frugalware.org/pub/other/gfxboot/

Unfortunately the documentation isn't really usable... also I don't know if this one works with grub. The README says syslinux and lilo.

Are there any patches I have to apply to grub to make it work?

Loci

[tomvollerthun]

HI. I don't know how the grub stuff on suse looks like, but I am using a background image with grub.
It was not necessary to patch the sources, I just used a picture with correct format and updated menu.lst to contain it.
For pictures that can be used out-of-the-box, search the grubsplash page.
hth, tom
_________________
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Dijsktra
---------------
Don't believe my "Guru" status!

[Loci79]

I think what you mean is the splashimage option....

in Suse's patched grub you can select what resolution you want, languages etc.... you even have a help page if you want...

These files are stored in a cpio-archive which is in /boot

With splashimage you can only choose what picture you wanna have... it's always 640x480 (? or 800x600 ?) which looks quite ugly on a 1024x768 lcd which centers the image instead of stretching it...

this is a sample screenshot from one vmware machine running morphix with gfxboot (this is how the program is called which generates the image)
http://www.geocities.com/g1powermac/vmwarescreen.JPG

I think it's easy to see, that this is not splashimage... as mentioned this program is called gfxboot, it stores all the data in a cpio-archive. the image itself is loaded in the patched grub with "gfxboot (hd0,0)/boot.img".
In the archive you can store different-resolution-splashimages, language-files, boot-methods (i'll explain it below) and so on.

boot-methods: the suse-install-cd/dvd has this menu too. in it there a menu from which you can select from where to install... via nfs, ftp, dvd, cd etc...

you see, this program makes grub even more highly configurable... the splash itself can be animated... e.g. a graphical timeout or so...

Loci

[monkey89]

Here's a patch against grub 0.96, taken and cleaned up from the Kanotix livecd:

http://www.adonics.net/public/grub-0.96_gfxmenu.patch

I'll be working on making something cool with it if it turns out to actually work.

THIS IS COMPLETELY UNTESTED, DON'T DO ANYTHING WITHOUT TESTING IT WELL

-Monkey

[nabilattaya]

There are ebuilds up https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85779 for grub with the gfxboot patch and at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79230 for the gfxboot programs. I'm just having a problem going from the gentoo.org/Krystal folder to the message file. I used mkbootmsg and had it output a message file to /boot/grub/message, just when i put gfxmenu (hd0,2)/grub/message it gives me an error on boot saying that the file is of the wrong format. If anyone knows howto go from the dir to the message file, or if there is something that i am missing in between or after, please let me know
Thank you very much
Peace

[Devport]

I installed both ebuilds available in the above bug reports and downloaded the theme available in one of the bug reports, built it by issuing a simple "make" and copied the resulting "./boot/message" to /boot/grub/message. The next step was to add "gfxmenu /boot/grub/message" to grub.lst and I had a very nice 800x600 graphical boot splash.

Great work - I hope this will be part of stable gentoo ASAP.

BTW: I did this all on a amd64 machine using ~x86 so its compatible with amd64 as well.

[Deathwing00]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Unsupported Software.

[Noyan]

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2545264.html#2545264