My friend Jo Shields added the missing piece by writing the first theme that fit the basic requirements (uses only legal & free fonts and images with no external dependencies), and now GRUB gets a new face!
This is just one of the ton of possibilities our new graphical menu framework was designed for. If you want to try it out, grub-pc 1.98~experimental.20100111.1-1 has just been uploaded to Debian/experimental. For non-Debian systems, Jo’s blog post provides a standalone tarball which can be used with GRUB Experimental branch in Bazaar.
Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, including Jo, Colin for developing the gfxmenu framework and Vladimir for his extensive work reviewing and polishing it.
Now for the obvious question (before anyone asks): when is this reaching mainstream? Well, there’s lots of code being added, and keep in mind GRUB is a bootloader and it must not compromise on its main feature (being able to boot!), so we need a pack of brave souls to try out the code, find bugs and report them. Once we’re reasonably sure the new code is mature, it’ll find its way to GRUB trunk and eventually GRUB 1.98. So you can help us out! Install it; spread the news; make your desktop a bit nicer and come to us if you find that something went terribly wrong ;-)
January 20, 2010 at 04:37 |
I am able to run grub experimental and see the themes for about 1 to 2 secs, then my laptop will reboot. I had to remove the graphical feature first and create a grub-gfxmenu.cfg beside my grub.cfg for testing.
January 15, 2010 at 06:59 |
Thanks information
January 13, 2010 at 23:37 |
Same thing here, it just doesn’t work. Well, grub by itself boots fine, but no theme at all.
January 15, 2010 at 08:06 |
Hi!
Please bring this on to BTS :-)
January 12, 2010 at 07:12 |
… and here I was thinking “what is supposed to happen if I hit the close button (top right)?” Shutdown the computer?
And then I realized it’s not part of the grub theme but is part of qemu.
January 12, 2010 at 01:56 |
I installed it and at least I can say my system keeps booting ;-)
Well, actually echo “set gfxpayload=keep” in /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme did what I couldn’t do :-)
But I still don’t manage to get the theme workin. I also installed grub2-splashimages, read README.Debian but to no avail :-(
January 11, 2010 at 21:29 |
Will there be an i386 version published of the package? The version you mention is only available for amd64…
January 11, 2010 at 23:17 |
It’s just a matter of time untill the i386/experimental buildd picks it up, check again in a few days!