GRUB Splash Images- Change & make your GRUB fully yours

How To Change GRUB Splash Image

When I say GRUB splash image I mean a background for your GRUB menu. So those people who have tried using Fedora Core or RedHat enterprise Linux its the blue(or red for some) image behind the menu with Fedora or Red Hat written.

This tutorial deals with how to create a splash image and how to add it. If you are not all that good with drawing you can check out few sites for GRUB splash Images and what you’ll get is an .xpm.gz file, you can skip the following steps and go directly to the last one dealing with how to add your spalsh image.

Requirements: We need a .xpm extension image (for which we have to use GIMP). For guys who don’t know what is .xpm its just like another image file format like .jpeg, .gif, .png etc. It stands for X PixMap Image. The size of image should be 640 X 480 pixels (not more, not less) and it should be having not more than 14 colors (this you’ll understand when I tell you how to do it). Last but not the least an ARTISTIC MIND (Show your creativity!!)

How to go about it: Assuming you have a great image ready with you of the size I specified(640 X 480). We need to change the color property. For this go to Image–>Mode select Indexed and a pop up window will appear. Under the heading “Color Map” in the first option named “Generate Optimum palette” change the value of “Maximum number of colors” to 14 and under “Dithering” heading select Floyd-Steinberg (normal) option for “Color dithering”. Click on Convert (Ya I know doesn’t look all that good) . Save the file in .xpm format and create a .gz archive for the same so that your new file is an archive with extension .xpm.gz.

How to add the image: Take the terminal. I assume that you have kept the image archive (having name Picture_01.xpm.gz, notice that there shouldn’t be a space between the words in the name of your file)in your home folder.

1. Create a folder in /boot/grub named images like

   :~$ cd /boot/grub/

   :~$ sudo mkdir images

2. Copy the .xpm.gz file from the home folder to the image folder created in the previous step

:~$ sudo cp Picture_01.xpm.gz /boot/grub/images

3.   Edit the menu.lst file in /grub/boot/. Place the following command after this line

## Pretty colours

#color red/white red/black

splashimage (hdX,Y)/boot/grub/images/Picture_01.xpm.gz

4.  You can get the value of X and Y from a partition editor it is basically the partition where where your /boot directory resides which is generally same as that of “/”(root) partition

5.  Save the menu.lst file and reboot the system

When the image loads you’ll see your image.

In case of any doubts or problems please feel free to ask.

Cheers