How to change GRUB Splash Screen

You might have been tired of the same old text mode GRUB splash screen in your Linux box, right? (Especially those of you who use Ubuntu just for the looks of it ) And maybe, you want to switch over from that blue and black hell to something better. Maybe a more realistic hell with red and black? Here is what you need to do for that.

You can add a background image just like wallpaper to your GRUB menu to make it more attractive. OR, you can also change the color of the menus and the text. Choice if yours to make. So, what you will need is,

1. An image in 14 colors format.
2. Size of the image MUST be 640px X 480px.
3. Image must be in xpm format.

Now, I assume that you have gathered these things. If you are similar to me, that is too lazy to make your own image, I suggest you take a look here and get the image you want. If you have the xpm image, then the next thing to do is to compress it using gzip.

gzip filename.xpm

That is it for the image file. Leave it aside for now. The next thing will be to copy this compressed image file to the /boot directory on your system. (This might require root permissions). Then either open /etc/GRUB.conf or open /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Always make a backup copy of any system file before you continue to edit the file.

Next, add following line to the GRUB configuration file you opened for editing in the last step.

splashimage=(hd0,0)/GRUB/filename.xpm.gz

Remember, the part (hd0,0) is actually where your kernel is. So take a look at the menu.lst file to make sure you have entered the correct path. Just copy the same numbers from the kernel line. Don’t make any changes there. The part of the line following the hd parameter is the path of the background image.

Now reboot the machine. If all went correctly (which it should) then you will be greeted by your new GRUB menu. You might have guessed that this will not work on distributions that have a dedicated menu like openSUSE. But for the rest of them, this will work as smooth as you would like.