Boot menu and slash screen

[black-clover]

How can I edit the text of the Grub menu and add a splash screen image during the boot of the system?
I read about an app called grub-customizer and found a Slackware pkg but it's old (4.0.6 where the latest version is 5.0.6) and also I'm not sure if it would work on Vector Linux or there would be dependencies issues.

[retired1af]

Everything you wanted to know about Grub2 and more.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html

[black-clover]

Thanks, actually I discovered that installing themes is a lot easier than customize the Grub. graphic.
The howto however does not say how to display the splash image while the kernel is loading.
Do I have to compile the kernel to do that or there is another way?

[nightflier]

I don't know the particulars of the process, but to point you in the general direction: The boot splash goes in the initrd, and the mechanism to research is "plymouth".

[black-clover]

ok, I installed and tried Plymouth but I must have done something wrong.

I used ctrl+alt+F2 to exit the desktop.
then #plymouthd
then #plymouth --show-splash

and got a blank screen with the message

gdm-binary{4013]:no suitable security token could be found

Any clue?

[M0E-lnx]

Splash screen is a pretty complex thing, hard to maintain and offers absolutely no benefit other than eye appeal, which is the reason we dropped it off the distro.  But if you want to restore it, here are some things you should look for.

After building the plymouth stuff, you will need to rebuild the initrd.  Your new initrd will need to include the plymouth binaries and related libraries as well as video drivers (modules) for your video card.

Once that is complete, you will need to probably edit a couple of init files (maybe rc.S and/or rc.M)

This is NOT exactly a howto, as you can tell is a pretty general idea of what is involved, which might serve as an explanation of why we dropped it.  Even when this is successfully and properly setup, the bootsplash was a hit-and-miss for us.  It would work for some users, not for others and would sometimes have undesired side effects (high cpu usage and consuming system resources come to mind)

Hope this helps (maybe?)

[black-clover]

I tried it on a test system, rebuilt the initrd and the boot process stopped halfway through... hahaha.
As you said, it's pretty tricky stuff, I put it in the backburner for the time being.

[retired1af]

Splash screens are one of the first thing I disable in Grub, regardless of distro. I like the scrolling text.