Posts Tagged ‘grub’

As some people have noticed, Debian has switched from the old Grub 0.9x series to the new Grub2 and where some things look like business as usual on the surface you quickly learn they are not. Case in point, changing the resolution of the grub menu and the terminal. This used to be accomplished by editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and amending VGA=791. However, trying this with the new Grub2 does nothing. It took me a while to find a descent explanation and tutorial on how to do this in Grub2. I found one from Harrison3001′s blog. I will summarize the steps I had taken to get the desired effect; however, I highly recommend reading the post to get a better understanding of what is different between Grub2 and Grub Legacy.

first as root edit /etc/default/grub and uncomment (remove the # before) and change the value to look like this:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1280×800

Then as root edit /etc/grub.d/00_header and find this line:

set gfxmode=${GRUB_GFXMODE}

insert below it this line:

set gfxpayload=keep

Once that is done run as root:

update-grub

Now reboot and you should have the Grub2 menu and the terminal set to the new monitor resolution.

To give your GRUB a little extra flair, instead of the boring blue, white, black default, you can add a grub splash image to /boot/grub/menu.lst

# general configuration:
timeout   5
default   0
splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

I like to use this GRUB theme which Franlin Piat developed. Once downloaded coppy into the directory specified in /boot/brub/menu.lst (change splash.xpm.gz to the file you wish to use)

You can also install a collection GRUB images

sudo apt-get install grub-splashimages

I also like to have a high resolution frame buffer. Generaly, I add vga=791 to the end of the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst for 1024×768; However, codehunk suggests vga=865 for 1280×800 widescreen resolution.

To have a nice boot-splash image install and configure splashy:

sudo-apt-get install splashy splashy-themes

The splashy themes are stored in /etc/splashy/themes, and the theme can be change by editing /etc/splashy/config.xml within the <current_theme> tag (I like debian3).  edit /boot/grub/menu.list and add “splash quiet” at the end of the kernel line. Once this is done run:

sudo update-initramfs -u -t -k `uname -r`

To help simplify this processes you can install a program to manage both Splashy and GRUB images

sudo apt-get install startup manager