Polishing your box with gensplash
To make your mythbox look less like a computer and more like a household
appliance, you can customise the kernel to show a nice graphic while your
box boots up and shuts down. This uses a package called gensplash. To
get this feature, carry out the following:
- Modify your kernel to include the following modules compiled in:
Device Drivers -->
Graphics support -->
Support for frame buffer devices
VESA VGA graphics support
VESA driver type (vesafb) -->
vesafb
Console display driver support -->
Video mode selection support
Framebuffer Console support
Support for the framebuffer splash
Block devices -->
RAM disk support
(4096) Default RAM disk size (kbytes)
Initial RAM disk (initrd) support
You should already have the event interface support module set up in
your kernel to allow the remote to work - this is also required here.
- Make sure that the following are not compiled in:
Device Drivers -->
Graphics support -->
Enable Tile Blitting Support
- Now recompile your kernel and copy it to your
/boot/
directory.
- Add the following line to your kernel's boot options in
/etc/lilo.conf:
append="splash=silent,theme:emergence quiet CONSOLE=/dev/tty1"
- At this point, we will use 800x600 to test that the gentoo theme works.
So make sure that you have a
vga=789 line at the top of
your /etc/lilo.conf. Now run lilo.
- Next
emerge splashutils splash-themes-gentoo.
- Reboot and you should see the pretty splash screen! Next task, adding our
own theme.
- Extract the theme files found here to
/etc/splash/mythbox/.
- Add an extra line to the end of you kernel's boot options in
/etc/lilo.conf as follows:
initrd = /boot/fbsplash-mythbox-800x600
Also, remember to change to theme to mythbox in the same
file.
- Execute
cd /etc/splash/; rm default; ln -s mythbox default.
This will make our theme the default theme.
- Now make the theme binary using
splash_geninitramfs -g
/boot/fbsplash-mythbox-800x600 -v -r 800x600 mythbox.
- Run lilo to make the changes take effect.
- Reboot and test it out!
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