Thanks

First of all I’d like to thank the people at uniklu for their kernels – thanks Gerald, Albrecht and Christian! These are the kernels you have to use for getting a bootlogo fast – and without compiling a kernel by yourself :)

Prerequisites

I presume you already have a bootsplashable kernel installed – if not, go an get yourself one at debian.uni-klu.ac.at.

The next thing you need is a running framebuffer. This howto doesn’t explain howto do this, but you surely will find information about this task.

Installation

You need a bunch of packages, so put these lines in your sources.list:

#bootsplash deb http://mentors.debian.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb-src http://mentors.debian.net/debian unstable main contrib non-free

Then run apt-get update. apt-cache search bootsplash will give you a list of packages:

bootsplash – Enables a graphical boot screen bootsplash-theme-debian-tux – The Debian Tux bootsplash theme bootsplash-theme-linux – The Default Linux bootsplash theme bootsplash-theme-tuxntosh – The Tuxntosh bootsplash theme sysv-rc-bootsplash – Bootsplash patches to rc/rcS files bootsplash-theme-debian-wave – Debian wave bootsplash theme bootsplash-theme-debiantux – The Debian Tux bootsplash theme bootsplash-theme-matrix – The Matrix bootsplash theme kernel-patch-bootsplash – Bootsplash enables a graphical boot screen (kernel-patch)

Install at least bootsplash and bootsplash-theme-debian-tux. bootsplash will ask you which kernel to patch with your choice of bootsplash.

The sysv-rc-bootsplash package provides support for bootsplash (progress bars, animations, etc…) during boot. Very nice :)

Bootloader

Here’s an excerpt from my menu.lst used by grub:

$ cat /boot/grub/menu.lst … # title Linux on (hd0,2) root=/dev/hda3 kernel (hd0,2)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 ip=off vga=0×0317 splash=silent initrd (hd0,2)/initrd.img …

The important thing is the part with vga=0x0317, which gives you a framebuffer with a resolution of 1024×768. If you like to boot without the bootloader messages then activate it with splash=silent.

Addition on using other themes (submitted by quitschibo)

If you want to use other themes than the ones provided with the debian packages bootsplash-theme-*, download them (for example at freshmeat) and extract them into /etc/bootsplash/themes. For some obscure reasons dpkg-reconfigure bootsplash will not recognise them, so you have to do some fancywork.

First

First backup your initrd by running:

cp /boot/yourinitrd yourinitrd.img

Second

Then attach your prefered bootsplash-theme on the initrd:

splash -s -f /etc/bootsplash/themes/$THEME/config/configfile.cfg >> /boot/your_initrd

On the next reboot your tty will greet you with a charming look.

Try different themes On-The-Fly

To try some different themes you don’t have to reboot your system on any change. Just use the following command to load a given theme on the fly into the active framebuffer of tty0:

splash -s -u 0 /etc/bootsplash/themes/preferedtheme/config/configfilefrom_theme.cfg

Bootsplash rules :)

[Special thanks to Gerd for his addition to my guide!]

Conclusion

Wasn’t that easy?