My space in the world

Well, I’m quite certain that there are a million tutorials on this subject. But I felt that the way I set up my Grub was really easy  and worth sharing. What I am trying to do here is to install a splashimage with the Grub2 bootloader on a (K)ubuntu (or equivalent) system. So here goes…

1. To begin with, you’d need to install the “grub2-splashimages” package. Please make sure that you’re running Grub2 and not an older version before you continue.

   $ sudo apt-get install grub2-splashimages

2. Once you do that, you should have a bunch of images under the folder: /usr/share/images/grub/
3. By default, Grub should offer you a 640×480 resolution. In most cases, the graphics card supports a higher resolution. You can check the highest available resolution by entering into the Grub command mode (press ‘c’ at the boot menu) and typing vbeinfo. Let us assume that your graphics card can support upto 1024×768 resolution at a 32-bit color depth.
4. Once you know the resolution, you can scale your own image to that size and save it as a TarGA (tga) image (use an image editor like Gimp) within the /usr/share/images/grub/ folder.
5. Now we edit the theme script. To do that, enter the following in your terminal:

   $ sudo kate /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme

   Where you can use your favourite text editor where I used kate. In that file, find the following line:

   for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base}/moreblue-orbit-grub.{png,tga} ; do

   … and change it to:

   for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base,/usr/share/images/grub}/splashimage.{png,tga} ; do

   Note: Replace the splashimage part with the filename. For example, you are using “tulips.png” as your image, replace “splashimage” with “tulips”.

6. Now to set the resolution, edit the /etc/default/grub file and change GRUB_GFXMODE to 1024×768 (or whatever your supported resolution is).
7. Once you are done with everything, run:

   $ sudo update-grub

   Once you execute the above, look for the following line in the output:

   Found Debian background: splashimage.tga

   And that should be all!

If you wish to change the text color, you may change the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to edit the menu_color_normal and menu_color_highlight values (those are written as foreground/background format).