HOWTO: Spice up your boot text [font resolution and color]

[darkmatter]

Nice little hack. Now Ubuntu looks like a Linux box while booting instead of a DOS error. They should make the settings a default for breezy, it would help in smoothing migration by preventing coronary arrest.

[lotusleaf]

Cool idea/thread, thanks.

[benplaut]

hmm...

it works, but the resolution is "hourglassing" my screen during bot/shutdown, and in the virtual consoles...

any way to make the resolution slightly bigger, but still nice and small?

[matthew]

Thought I would share another little edit...just for fun. I made the brackets that surround the red "fail" or green "ok" blue. Here's the edit to my /lib/lsb/init-functions:

# Only do the fancy stuff if we have an appropriate terminal
# and if /usr is already mounted
TPUT=/usr/bin/tput
EXPR=/usr/bin/expr
if [ -x $TPUT ] && [ -x $EXPR ] && $TPUT hpa 60 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
COLS=`$TPUT cols`
if [ -n "$COLS" ]; then
COL=`$EXPR $COLS - 7`
else
COL=73
fi
UP=`$TPUT cuu1`
END=`$TPUT hpa $COL`
START=`$TPUT hpa 0`
RED=`$TPUT setaf 1`
GREEN=`$TPUT setaf 2`
BLUE=`$TPUT setaf 4`
NORMAL=`$TPUT op`
if [ $1 -eq 0 ]; then
echo "$UP$END${BLUE}[ ${GREEN}ok${BLUE} ]${NORMAL}"
else
echo -e "$UP$START $RED*$NORMAL$END${BLUE}[${RED}fail${BLUE}]${NORMAL}"
fi
else
if [ $1 -eq 0 ]; then
echo " ...done."
else
echo " ...fail!"
fi
fi
return $1
}

The important parts, of course, are where you see "BLUE." You are all smart...probably don't need to say any more. Just be sure to spell TPUT right...I did a typo and had to use a live cd to unmount the hd from read only and remount it as read/write and edit the file because my computer wouldn't boot. Not difficult, but a bit time consuming.

[wabble]

It should be pointed out that the green "ok" messages violate standards for color blindness compatibility, so if you plan on releasing a distro any time soon, don't include that

I myself kinda like it.

The director of the it department at my old job told me (if i remember correctly) that ibm had done research on the color use for their terminals (you know as/400?) and found out that green was the color that was minimal on making your eyes tired of all colors

[mcduck]

yeah, at one time many computer monitors had a button that changed the image to green/black to save your eyes.

Anyway, should we bann all colors and meake a B/W distro because everybody can't see every color? I don't think so, as long as the color is not the only thing giving information to user. /I mean using green/red balls at boot instead of ok/failed-text would be a problem to colorblind people, but with text that shouldn't be any problem as long as they can still read And for us that can see all colors green/red texts can be quite helpful, and at least they look better so I think this feature should be used as default..

Thanks for the tip, I've been missing this feature.

[Belutz]

nice tips...
i love it

[myha]

Hi!

Awesomw stuff, thanks!

Does anyone know howto color other console stuff? Like hostname in diffrent color, user,... I know gentoo has this by default.

[Rodrigo]

Superb, Thanks!

[John Nilsson]

If you find the framebuffer to be to sluggish (as I did) you might want to try SVGATextMode instead. Much snappier.