GRUB appearance improvement?

[MG&TL]

Recently, at my school, I used an Apple Mac that had been dual-booted with Windows so it could use the standard school network and applications/limitations. Anyway, I noticed that the mac version of grub looked considerably better than the current 'purple text' version we have with ubuntu.

As the main message of ubuntu is 'user-friendly', perhaps we could put some thought into redesigning the graphical aspect of GRUB, particularly as most Windows transitionees, myself included, have dual-booted at some point. The grub screen can be intimidating, and looks especially bad on boot.

I am happy to donate photographs and/or artwork to help, if this is possible?

[fjgaude]

Good thought... likely this will come about in fullness of time. Right now the guys are hard at it getting 11.10 up fully.

Backgrounds are usually never an issue, photos galore!

[MG&TL]

Yes, of course...is 11.10 likely to be a 'significant' release (by this I mean like 11.04 had Unity, and 12.04 will be a LTS) , or are they just ironing out the bugs in Unity?

Is there somewhere I can get the source code for GRUB (if there is any?), that way I can experiment and see what happens.

Good luck with 11.10 guys!

[MG&TL]

Or there again, just downloaded the source and read the license, and apparently distributing unedited copies is allowed, but not editing it in any way. Bang goes the theory.

[PhantmKllr]

Yes, of course...is 11.10 likely to be a 'significant' release (by this I mean like 11.04 had Unity, and 12.04 will be a LTS) , or are they just ironing out the bugs in Unity?

Is there somewhere I can get the source code for GRUB (if there is any?), that way I can experiment and see what happens.

Good luck with 11.10 guys!

11.10 is a somewhat "significant" release, considering the switch from the GNOME 2 (GTK 2) stack to the GNOME 3 (GTK 3) stack, but I don't think that work is being done to improve GRUB's apperaance.

Perhaps you should voice your idea at the Ubuntu Brainstorm.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com

[godhika]

Yes, of course...is 11.10 likely to be a 'significant' release (by this I mean like 11.04 had Unity, and 12.04 will be a LTS) , or are they just ironing out the bugs in Unity?

Well 11.10 sees the change to Gnome3 and also Gtk3 which means big changes behind the scene

[hugmenot]

Or there again, just downloaded the source and read the license, and apparently distributing unedited copies is allowed, but not editing it in any way. Bang goes the theory.

Read again. It’s not so simple. There might be simple explanations of the GPL on the web selsewhere too.

[fjgaude]

Or there again, just downloaded the source and read the license, and apparently distributing unedited copies is allowed, but not editing it in any way. Bang goes the theory.

It's open source as far as I know. Here's their homepage:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

[MG&TL]

Oops, I was reading the licence for the licensing document...

It is indeed open-source. I shall get to work understanding how it works...please tell me it's written in C++...please...

[edujose]

Could it be possible that your school uses BURG instead of GRUB?

BURG is derived from GRUB 2 and allows for fancier backgrounds, icons instead of text and other graphical goodness.

I haven't used it myself, but saw other people installing and customizing it for dual boot between windows and ubuntu.

You can see some some BURG screenshots in its site.