SDB:Animated penguin GRUB splash screen

openSUSE Support Database

Portal - SDB Categories - How to write an article

Tested on openSUSE

Recommended articles

SDB:Gfxboot

Related articles

This HOWTO is about changing frequency of substitution of the GRUB Legacy (not Grub2) boot screen with an animated splash screen that has a couple of penguins moving around.

Prerequisites

Penguins

Root access to the machine
Text editor
Shell/Terminal access
openSUSE theme for Gfxboot

Procedure

The short way

In a terminal

su -

and enter the root password.

Change the frequency of the splash screen appearance by running

gfxboot --change-config base::penguin=100

Whereby you can change 100 to any number from -1 to 100.

Value	Meanings
-1	Date dependent, use this for e.g. Christmas surprise.
0	Penguins never show
100	Penguins always show
1-99	Probability (% of the time)

The long way

Create a temporary new directory in your home folder. (You can create it anywhere, but for simplicity, I will say the path as the home folder and the directory name as new).
Now copy the file message from the /boot folder in this directory using the command

cp /boot/message new

Now change into the new directory

cd new

Extract the files from the archive message using the command

cpio -i < message

Now minimize the terminal and open the directory new that you created. Edit the file gfxboot.cfg using your favorite text editor.
The file will contain a line penguin=-1 or similar, depending on openSUSE version. This number (variable from -1 to 100) is the probability of the penguin splash screen being shown. The meaning of the values are the same as the table above.
Change the number to desirable value (e.g. if you like penguins and want to see them always write 'penguin=100'). Save the file.
Coming back to the proceedings, delete the message file in the directory new by running

rm message

in the terminal.

Now recompress the archive

ls . | cpio -o > message’

Now the last step, enter the command

su -
cp message /boot

Enter your root password if required and you are done. Next time you boot up, you will be greeted by the penguins depending on the probability set.

Note

Updating the gfxboot package will recreate /boot/message using the original -1 penguin specification. This can be prevented by:

chattr +i /boot/message