HOWTO: Make your own GRUB bootsplash image

[Snowhog]

Requirements: A graphics editor and ImageMagick (If ImageMagick is not installed, you will need to intall it)

WARNING! Before making changes to any system file, make a BACKUP copy of it!!

Steps:
1- If you are creating a new image, make the size 640x480 with a color depth of 14.
If editing an existing image, resize or crop it to 640x480 and set the color depth to 14.
Images that have high color depth will likely not look very good when saved with a color depth of 14. For that reason, choose existing images that have color depths that are 256 or less, or save the image you are editing as gray scale (black and white).

2- When satisfied with the image, save it with a suitable file extension (In this HOWTO I'm using .png and will refer to the filename as bootsplash.png)

3- Open a console and change into the directory where you saved the image file.

4- As root, type:

sudo convert bootsplash.png -colors 14 -resize 640x480 bootsplash.xpm

(NOTE: If the image you created is already sized as 640x480 and the color depth was set to 14, you can omit the -colors 14 and -resize 640x480, although including them doesn't do any harm)

5- As root, compress the image (not required, but it saves disk space) by typing:

sudo gzip bootsplash.xpm

6- As root, create a new directory called splashimages under /boot/grub by typing:

sudo mkdir /boot/grub/splashimages

(This isn't required, but I like having a separate directory for my boot splash images)

7- As root, copy the compressed image file to the /boot/grub/splashimages directory with:

sudo cp bootsplash.xpm.gz /boot/grub/splashimages

8- As root, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add the following line below the ## ## End Default Options ## entry:

splashimage=(hdx,y)/boot/grub/splashimages/bootsplash.xpm.gz

where (hdx,y) is identical to your root line entry. Using my menu.lst entries as an example, this is what you would see, where my (hdx,y) is (hd0,1):

## ## End Default Options ##

splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splashimages/romulan.xpm.gz

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,1)

9- Save and reboot. You should now see your image as the background in your GRUB boot menu.