Fancy menu for GRUB EFI

[bean123]

Hi,

This is based on Colin's fancy menu patch, with my latest fb driver that provides graphics mode for efi.

Binary package:
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/gfxmenu.zip

Just extract the files to the root directory, and select grub64.efi from rEFIt boot menu. It's a little slow, but the menu looks much better than the original.

There are four themes in grub.cfg, you can use # to comment out the ones you don't want, the default theme is winter.

Here are some screen shot from Colin's project page:
http://grub.gibibit.com/Themes

Source code can be downloaded from my github branch at:
http://github.com/bean123/grub/

[kosumi68]

Cool menus, but I can't seem to get it to work on my setup. Where is grub64.efi looking for the fonts and themes? On the same partition, relative to any particular directory, or something else?

[pxwpxw]

Placed in the OSX partition root /

/boot/
grub64.efi
grub.cfg

Nice first screen, promises great stuff, then getting lost.

Gets the initial graphical boot screen, then 'c' gets nice black window and shell prompt sh:grub>
(with painfully slow response).

No success so far trying to edit menuentry for actual boot, dont know why.
e.g. could not use 'configfile /grub2.cfg' to get sub-menu.
Do we need to read about classes?

Missing commaands in the demo grub64.efi include 'echo' 'read' 'videotest' so selections from first screen fail on these.

Will try more later.

[bean123]

Placed in the OSX partition root /

/boot/
grub64.efi
grub.cfg

Nice first screen, promises great stuff, then getting lost.

Gets the initial graphical boot screen, then 'c' gets nice black window and shell prompt sh:grub>
(with painfully slow response).

No success so far trying to edit menuentry for actual boot, dont know why.
e.g. could not use 'configfile /grub2.cfg' to get sub-menu.
Do we need to read about classes?

Missing commaands in the demo grub64.efi include 'echo' read' 'videotest' so selections from first screen fail on these.

Will try more later.

There are still problem with colin's patch, it's not quite optimized and the screen needs to be redrawn a lot. I plans to rework the menu system soon, this is just a demo of what the fancy menu looks like.

[bean123]

The new graphic menu system is almost done now, you can use menuentry to add boot items, for example, grub.cfg could be like this:

menuentry "AAA" {
set root=(hd0,1)
chainloader +1
}

menuentry "BBB" --class ubuntu {
true
}

. /menu/menu_efi.cfg

You can also use config file format, which allows you to construct sub menu as well:

menu
{
Linux
{
command = "linuz .. \n initrd .."
}

"Sub Menu"
{
Halt
{
class = "Other"
command = "halt"
}

Reboot
{
command = "reboot"
}
}
}

Save this to a file like my_menu.txt, then use merge_config to append it to the menu list:

merge_config /my_menu.txt

The menu.cfg file appends a Tools menu, it contains the following tools:

Toggle Mode
Switch between text and graphic mode

Terminal
Open a terminal window, ESC to quit

Change Theme
Change menu theme

Layout Demo
Run the layout demo, ESC to quit

Halt
shutdown

Reboot
reboot

The resource file is at:

http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/menu.zip

[pxwpxw]

After editing several files to get a working gfx menu I liked, looking good, all OS booting ok. The background picture makes it necessary to tweak terminal background and some other colours. Lots of options to understand.
Terminal is good, still missing history and tab completion, also paging option (like efi shell -b on individual command). Other multiple terminal configurations work well (not popup).

Screen 1920x1200.

Not tried on text screen, default is too small, refit efi shell can change text mode to max native resolution (mode command), but IDK why one would need to use text mode on Apple.

Attached pictures and detail on edited files.
This was grub.cfg

. /menu/pxw1x.cfg
. /menu/menu_efi.cfg