still don't have a title

Pimp My Boot Process

I’ve tested Ubuntu the other day and I must say I was really impressed how polished the boot process looked. Ubuntu uses the same image as grub splash and as usplash image. This has the nice effect that there is no visible switch between grub and usplash. I don’t remember if they even used the same image for the login as well, but it would surely improve the boot experience even further.

Since we have grub and usplash in our repository too, I thought it would be nice to create something similar for Debian. Creating an image and preparing it for grub is not that hard but creating something suitable for usplash actually is a problem.

First obstacle: usplash uses certain defined colors from the palette of the splash to draw stuff like text, background and progress bar, so you almost certainly have to re-arrange the position of the colors in the palette of the image manually. Second: installing the image is not exactly user-friendly. You have to create a .c-file from the .png. Compile it to a .so. and regenerate the initramfs in order to activate the theme…

While second part is not that hard and can be done by a script, the first problem (re-arranging the color palette entries) seems kinda unsolvable for me and my limited Gimp skills.

So does anyone know a tool which allows to create a usplash theme painlessly?

I think it would be nice to have some grub/usplash theme packs in our repositories. While it’s certainly uninteresting for servers it surely adds some extra fun for our desktop users.