Configuration of GRUB splash image

Seeing a nice booting splash image add much fun to using linux… at least to me. Better still you can personalize your booting screen with your favorite (simple) image. There are quite a few nice HOWTOs about this topic, but it still takes me a while to make things work, so I think it is worth some notes here.

For ubuntu users, here is an easy-to-follow guide of adding splash image on ubuntu/debian.

And if you would like to know more about splashimage go to visit a detailed version here.

Step 1: Make sure your grub support splash image, up-to-date versions should. Otherwise try to patch it by googling

Step 2: Grab an image, it must be a xpm file, and xpm.gz are more storage-conserving, and usually faster. You can download well-tested splashimages from web to test, (better for the first try) or you can make your own.

Note: this image must be 640*480, indexed with at most 14 colors. Many great pictures just look terrible after the conversion, so you may want to try gif pictures because they’re originally indexed and the compression won’t do as much harm as to color-rich ones. It’s a good idea to paint with 14 colors by yourself.

Tool: I prefer Gimp, because it’s powerful and you know what your picture looks like after each modification. right click the image and choose image->mode->indexed, then fill the color number region with 14, choose None for the Dithering option at the bottom. Save the picture with XXXXXX.xpm.gz, Gimp knows the trick of gzip

Step 3: Now we go back to the GRUB part. On Debian based systems, GRUB will search for splash.xpm.gz automatically in the /boot/grub/ folder when you run ‘update-grub’. It’s a good idea to establish a directory for the images, for example

mkdir /boot/grub/images

Then you can copy your favorite image candidates here. Under /boot/grub, Use the command

ln -s ./images/XXXXXX.xpm.gz splash.xpm.gz

This creates a symbolic link to the actual image you’re using. So what’s left is to inform grub to use the image. For Debian update-grub will do this for you, but you may still want to update by yourself (probably on some other distributuion). Then edit the menu.lst (with sudo of course) to add a line like:

splashimage (hdX,Y)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

or

splashimage (hdX,Y)/grub/splash.xpm.gz (if your /boot has its own partition)

or

splashimage=(hdX,Y)${BOOTPREFIX}/grub/splash.xpm.gz

 before the booting records. (hdX, Y) should agree with the booting entry that provides  GRUB, e.g. (hd0, 0). It seems ‘=’ and ‘ ‘ can be used interchangeably.

Note: By using a symbolic link you can avoid most trouble encountered by poor users like me. Because it has been pointed out in a ubuntu forum thread that when reading the menu.lst grub has some limitations on the length the path/filename. So you may end up with strips and dots if your image filename+path is too long. With a simbolic link it doesn’t matter at all where your pictures are stored, as long as they are visible by GRUB.

Good luck and Enjoy!