[Smaug] Creating grub-2 screen background for Karmic or Lucid boot

[Peter Belew]

As well as creating a custom login background, you can also create a custom background for the grub-2 boot menu (for Lucid or Karmic and other distros using grub-2)

Note that if you upgraded online from Jaunty or earlier distros, you may still have the legacy Grub 1, to which this note does not apply.

You need to be root to do the following steps. (You can use sudo for the commands).

First, create a directory to put the image in - I created 
  
   /boot/grub/grub2-backgrounds

Second, create a 640x480 background image. Mine is 'lynx.png' for Lucid Lynx.
The image should probably be a low-contrast image which is light in color, to contrast with the menu text.

Third, edit the file

  /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme

Here you can specify the colors for the grub-2 boot menu, and also specify how to get the background image. Here are excerpts from this file on my laptop:

at about line 7:

  if test -e ${f} ; then
  source ${f}
else
  WALLPAPER="/usr/share/images/desktop-base/moreblue-orbit-grub.png"
  #peter's colors
  COLOR_NORMAL="blue/black"
  COLOR_HIGHLIGHT="white/blue"
fi

at about line 64
# check for usable backgrounds
use_bg=false
if [ "$GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT" = "gfxterm" ] ; then
#  for i in /boot/grub/`basename ${WALLPAPER}` ${WALLPAPER} ; do
  #peter's mod - replace previous line with this:
  for i in /boot/grub/grub2-backgrounds/lynx.png; do


Fourth, save that file and run update-grub. This will rewrite all the files in /boot/grub/.

Then reboot and try out your new boot screen.

Some references:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2

This page shows what text/background colors can be used for the menu text. Note that 'black' background means 'transparent'. Experimentation will show you what colors to use with your chosen background.

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20/GRUB2%20Splashimages.html

-- 
  It's completely normal that you lose data on "Windows" platforms.
  That's why you have a Linux/BSD/UNIX server for backups.

  SMAUG:        http://scruz.org/
  My Web:       http://littlegreenmen.armory.com/~peterbe/ 
  UBUNTU:       10.04 LTS April 2010
		https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx
  SuSE:		http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.2