FAQ
From Bootsplash
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I use the bootsplash screen?
To use the bootsplash screen you should use a framebuffer (vesafb hasbeen thoughoughly tested) with a display resolution of at least 640x480.
Additionaly, the kernel needs bootsplash support. SuSE Kernels support this since since 7.2 (selectable pictures since 7.3).
As the picture has to be available to the kernel before any filesystems are mounted, it has to be appended to the initial ramdisk. SuSE's mkinitrd does this for you. Mandrake has a mk_initrd that should work as well. Other distributions may or may not apply these patches. In this case you can use the "splash" utility manually to create the neccesary initrds.
See the section [Kernel stuff|Kernel] for more information on this.
So I patch the kenel and that's it?
No. There are certain things that still need to be done in user space. Do you want to display animations, the progress bar or render truetype text messages? You might need to install extra programs, although they may already be included in other packages (for example: fbmngplay is part of the mng library...this was written for the bootsplash and made it back into the library.
The following documentation should clear all that up.
Themeing? These config files are really cryptic!
Everything in the linux bootplash is themeable. This means that you can change every option, sometime in several ways. Unfortunatly this leads to a confusing config file, or a very long config file with every option explained, which has to be parsed...and that is not what you want, believe me.
At this point in time the program BootsplashMaker can write basic config files but it is not ready for version 3 yet. It is being updated to include a "option editor" where you can change every aspect of the config file. This is due to the rapid development in the last months. (We can't write the configuration program when the name and number of variables changes from day to day :-)
Once you've patched the kernel, installed the user space stuff, made your neat pictures and written these funky configuration files you might want to check out the themes that have already been made for the bootplash project. Most of them are "SuSE themes" (because we work for them, and when we develop the program we make the first themes for them) but there are also themes from Mandrake, United Linux (we kinda work for them too), and Gentoo (which has some really cool stuff, in my opinion. -kwwii)
Will the bootsplash patch be included officially in future kernel versions?
We would like to see that happen. But before that can happen, some things have to be cleaned up. Implementing other bit depths than 16bit, and other picture loaders than the jpg one are things that come to the mind. Also the userspace utility needs nicer config files. Nowadays other bootsplash implementations require a much smaller kernel patch. Maybe they are better candidates for a permanent vanilla kernel inclusion. So far SUSE/Novell had the bootsplash applied by default (and is actively using it) in their products
How do I use silent mode?
You can trigger the bootsplash behaviour with a kernel parameter, that you append via your bootloader (grub/lilo):
- splash=silent switches the bootsplash to silent mode initially
- splash=verbose switches the bootsplash to verbose mode initially. This is default, but if you override the default in the kernel patch, you can use this option to get verbose mode back.
- splash=0 switches the bootsplash off
It seems that the display needs to be in 16bpp mode for the bootsplash to work -- is this correct?
Currently the bootsplash only works with 16bit. It's still outstanding to implement at least 24bit depth as well. But as you dont get that much out of it (except nicer gradients and 50% higher memory consumption) this has not been done yet. For the vesa framebuffer you can specify i.e. vga=791 for 1024x768.
Why do I get wrong colors when using the native atyfb/aty128fb driver (and maybe others)?
The ATI kernel framebuffer drivers don't use true color for 16/24/32bit resolutions per default but rather some index/true color mix.There's a patch to change this behaviour is avaliable for the ATI Rage128 driver at ftp.openbios.org/pub/bootsplash/kernel/aty128-bootsplash.diff
Why do I see a kernel panic on my (Debian) system?
By Jon H. Davis:
It turns out that the make-kpkg and debian configure scripts for etch are using the initramfs-tools package to build a compressed cpio randisk. A "bootsplash" file produced by "splash -s -f" is actually there in the root of the ramdisk image.
Catting the file onto the end of the ramdisk image basically destroys the compressed cpio format, and leads to the kernel panics.
