Long ago, when all we had was 32bit Slackware and I was working on realizing the 64bit variant of Slackware, I created a ’64bit’ lilo bitmap with the Slackware logo, to make it more obvious to your friends that your computer is booting 64bit Slackware and not some obscure other distro.
Lilo is getting a bit old in the tooth though. Mdern computers come with UEFI instead of good old BIOS, and that computer cannot boot on lilo. You’ll have to use elilo or grub instead.
Until now, Slackware supported elilo in the distro installer, but if you wanted to give your computer a Grub bootloader instead of elilo, you would have to do that manually right after the installation of Slackware is completed. Or you could swap out elilo for grub at any later time of course – it is not difficult.
Slackware-current is working its way toward making Grub the default bootloader. The process of installing or upgrading kernels is now automated to the level that if you have Grub installed as the bootloader, there’s nothing you need to do yourself: an initrd is generated based on your preferences (preferences can be written to the files /etc/default/grub , /etc/default/geninitrd and /etc/mkinitrd.conf), the grub bootmenu is refreshed and that’s it!
Recently I switched to Grub on this laptop which until then had been happily booting via elilo. As you may have seen, I use a nice graphical boot screen in liveslak and when I booted this laptop via Grub the first time, I was a bit disappointed by the text-only boot menu much like the boot experience I had with elilo.
But I like my liveslak boot screen!
So I set myself to finding out how I could install and enable that same boot screen in regular Slackware.
The result is in the ZIP archive http://www.slackware.com/~alien/liveslak-grub2-theme.zip . Here’s how to use it to get a nice boot splash on your Slackware computer with Grub (the prior installation of Grub is something I leave to you):
- Extract the archive containing the Grub theme into directory
/boot/grub/themes/ - You will now have a new directory
/boot/grub/themes/liveslak-grub2-theme– change its name to/boot/grub/themes/liveslak In the file ‘/etc/default/grub‘ add or modify the following lines:
GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub/themes/liveslak/theme.txt
GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/themes/liveslak/dejavusansmono12.pf2
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768,800x600,640x480,auto
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep- Then run (as root) the command:
update-grub - Now, reboot. You should be greeted by a Slackware logo and the Grub boot menu.
Let me know in the comments section what you think of this!
Cheers and enjoy the weekend, Eric
That’s phantastic!
Thanks you
Very nice addition ! Thank you !
Oh wow, I hope this gets added to -current. Looks nice!
Beautiful! Now I just need to make it work in my native (FHD) screen resolution. Thanks Eric!
Actually, I just had to add my native resolution to the GRUB_GFXMODE= line, and so far it works. Thanks Eric!
In my case, a beautiful birthday present!
Thanks Eric, nice addition.!
Francisco
Way cool, thanks! 🙂
And I’m amazed at how easy grub is. If I can pick it up in a complete panic over my new hard drive not booting, anyone can.
Thanks Eric for the theme! I generally never see the boring Grub boot menu because servers booting headless. I will try out the theme since it will be nice to know it’s there if I ever look at the boot process :).
Thanks Eric. I also felt the grub default was boring. This is much nicer!
In the upslak.sh script help there is an option for upgrading generic kernel and its modules as 2 separate files (packages).
Options -k and -m are used.
As the latest generic kernel has modules packed together in one package file, how to properly invoke upslak.sh script ?
I need to fix my upslak.sh script to accept the new type of kernel-generic package. I cannot promise when I have the time to do that.
Of course, I’ll wait for this fix. But for now, I think about to try to split the new kernel-generic package into 2 packages, like it was before. And then it should work with today’s upslak.sh script.