GRUB2 theme for Wheezy?
Dear Debian developers, dear fellow artists,
I have added a GRUB2 theme to my theme proposal "The Journey" for Wheezy. Such a theme was requested by one of our users, Jo Shields, who also did the ground work for it.
Just for those of us, who haven't had the time yet to look into that stuff: A GRUB 2 theme is not just a background picture. It is a complete graphical boot screen. Grub 2 includes the code for this since November 2009.
You find the theme here:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/journey#Grub_2_-_Theme
The appearance is similar to the GDM3 login screen. So the boot screen comes with a clean, simple look that is familiar to most of our users.
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The installation is pretty simple:
Download the tar.gz. Copy the folder "journey" to /boot/grub/themes/
Add a line to /etc/default/grub
GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub/themes/journey/theme.txt
You may also wish to set the GRUB2 resolution to something that matches your screen size. You find valid resolutions if you hit "c" at the Grub boot menu and type "vbeinfo". The line in /etc/default/grub should look like this:
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
Then run sudo update-grub
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If you want to customize the GRUB 2 theme, f.i. for your own Debian artwork, this is also easy:
Just exchange the file /boot/grub/themes/journey/background.png with your own picture in the correct size. The image will be streched to fit the users screen. So please don't use circles, swirls or other things that may look distorted. An abstract picture should be fine.
If you want to create a GRUB 2 theme from scratch, download the documentation at:
http://www.4shared.com/file/lFCl6wxL/grub_guidetar.html
(Yes, the site looks like some "make money fast" crap, but the documentation is excellent).
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I would really like to help to get this into the desktop-base package for Wheezy, at least as a graphical option for our users. I am pretty sure we can integrate it with the existing alternatives concept:
We could for instance ask the Grub 2 maintainers to make a symlink "/boot/grub/themes/desktop-base" that points to "/etc/alternatives/desktop-grub-theme". Then we let our desktop-base package create the symlink "/etc/alternatives/desktop-grub-theme" that points to an individual theme like /usr/share/images/desktop-base/grub-theme/journey.
Hope this helps.
Best wishes
Ulrich
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