How to: Create a Customized GRUB2 Screen that is Maintenance Free.

[Cavsfan]

Hey Cavsfan - seen this??

I haven't had a chance to research it yet - will be interesting to find out the pros and cons.

I have seen at least one thread on this forum where someone installed burg and there were problems.
They had to get help. Search for this in google site:ubuntuforums.org ubuntu burg
Myself I am content with Grub2.

[von Stalhein]

Yep, after a bit of reading me too!!

[Navalio]

Very good tutorial, but still could not change the font for grub2 boot menu. Found several thread via google, where the grub-mkfont used, but it did not help. Seems, that needed to insert the module "font" and later to load it in grub2. As well understand, that those commands should be outputted to the grub.conf, but where to insert them? in the 40_custom file or in the 00_header something should be changed? Does anyone really made configuration for different fonts, which remains after the "sudo update-grub" command?

[Cavsfan]

Very good tutorial, but still could not change the font for grub2 boot menu. Found several thread via google, where the grub-mkfont used, but it did not help. Seems, that needed to insert the module "font" and later to load it in grub2. As well understand, that those commands should be outputted to the grub.conf, but where to insert them? in the 40_custom file or in the 00_header something should be changed? Does anyone really made configuration for different fonts, which remains after the "sudo update-grub" command?

You don't want to put anything in 40_custom, you want to make your custom entries in 40_custom and then save it as 06_custom,
leaving 40_custom untouched. That way the custom entries will always be first in the menu. Let me do a bit of checking on your
font problem. I remember when I did an "upgrade" from Lucid to Maverick, I could not get the font to change. I think it changed but,
not to what I had expected. I messed my kernel up and ended up doing a clean install and then the fonts worked perfectly. I am not
implying you need to do that. Let me see what I can find out.

[Cavsfan]

Very good tutorial, but still could not change the font for grub2 boot menu. Found several thread via google, where the grub-mkfont used, but it did not help. Seems, that needed to insert the module "font" and later to load it in grub2. As well understand, that those commands should be outputted to the grub.conf, but where to insert them? in the 40_custom file or in the 00_header something should be changed? Does anyone really made configuration for different fonts, which remains after the "sudo update-grub" command?

If you created the font from this tutorial, all you should need to do is add this line to /etc/default/grub via gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/DejaVuSansMono.pf2

It is line number 11 in my file. And of course sudo update-grub2 or sudo update-grub (both the same) to make the changes stick.
Try that first and see if that takes care of it.
I have not seen any other fonts used. But, if this one will not do as expected, it is not the font causing the problem.

[Navalio]

If you created the font from this tutorial, all you should need to do is add this line to /etc/default/grub via gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub/DejaVuSansMono.pf2

It is line number 11 in my file. And of course sudo update-grub2 or sudo update-grub (both the same) to make the changes stick.
Try that first and see if that takes care of it.
I have not seen any other fonts used. But, if this one will not do as expected, it is not the font causing the problem.

Thanks for quick reply,
Will check a bit later - just came from work.

EDIT:
Cavsfan, so i followed step-by-step the tutorial and eventually the boot font was changed. So, i found mine mistakes: the variable GRUB_FONT was the last one in the /etc/default/grub , thus (seem for me) the font modules were not loaded, but after moving it on the 1st position mine font appeared. And the 2nd bug, which was in mine box, was that the grub-mkfont configured DejavuSansMono font with errors(?), therefore it was not correctly converted to pf2(converting error was somenthing like "Unknown gsub feature 0x73756273 (subs)
", but i will search for that problem additionally), and only the font from the mscorefonts package finally were adopted to the boot screen.

Thanks for your advises.

[Cavsfan]

Thanks for quick reply,
Will check a bit later - just came from work.

EDIT:
Cavsfan, so i followed step-by-step the tutorial and eventually the boot font was changed. So, i found mine mistakes: the variable GRUB_FONT was the last one in the /etc/default/grub , thus (seem for me) the font modules were not loaded, but after moving it on the 1st position mine font appeared. And the 2nd bug, which was in mine box, was that the grub-mkfont configured DejavuSansMono font with errors(?), therefore it was not correctly converted to pf2(converting error was somenthing like "Unknown gsub feature 0x73756273 (subs)
", but i will search for that problem additionally), and only the font from the mscorefonts package finally were adopted to the boot screen.

Thanks for your advises.

Don't worry about those errors when converting the font. I had the same thing and I thought I mentioned that in the tutorial.
I don't know what they meant, but they didn't effect the font, so I didn't worry about it. My fonts and my Grub2 menu look great!
And I had the font command just after the last line in the first few commands in that file. And that apparently does have a big impact.

If all else fails (although I think you are good now). you could always go by drs305 Grub2 tutorial and reinstall Grub2 and then
go through my tutorial from scratch.

I upgraded from Lucid to Maverick and lots of things in Grub were not quite right. I did a clean install, but I could have probably just
re-installed grub and been OK.
Even after I did a clean install I got the errors converting the font. But, all is well.

[morbs_gt]

Hi there.

Thanks for your post OP.

I have a custom grub2 boot with this change in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" 

which means I will still have my boot menu with custom entries and background, and have a verbose bootup.

My question is: is it possible to change the black background behind the verbose bootup? Which files should I look into for this? Thanks.

[Cavsfan]

Hi there.

Thanks for your post OP.

I have a custom grub2 boot with this change in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" 

which means I will still have my boot menu with custom entries and background, and have a verbose bootup.

My question is: is it possible to change the black background behind the verbose bootup? Which files should I look into for this? Thanks.

You are welcome.
Here is what I have:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" 

You should be able to go by step 2 on page one via this command:
gksu gedit /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme
That is where you would put the file name of the picture you want for your background.
I say on page one that it has to be in /usr/share/images/desktop-base/, but it
can actually be where ever you want it as long as WALLPAPER= in 05_debian_theme file points to your picture's location.

[morbs_gt]

Yeah, I have the following in /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme

# this allows desktop-base to override our settings
f=/usr/share/desktop-base/grub_background.sh
if test -e ${f} ; then
  . ${f}
else
  WALLPAPER="/usr/share/images/grub/Grass_1280x1024.tga"
  COLOR_NORMAL="light-gray/black"
  COLOR_HIGHLIGHT="yellow/black"
fi 

and everything works fine. I have my custom background and and font color for the boot menu.

What I'm wondering though is, is there a way to change the background of the scrolling text of the verbose boot which follows the grub boot menu selection. I do not wish to display the splash, just the text boot, but would like to edit the background of the scrolling text.

This scrolling text is gray on a black background on my end, and wasn't sure which file to look into for that, or if it is at all possible by simply editing a configuration file.

Thanks for your reply though.