Monthly Archive for October, 2006

Creating A Grub Splash Image

Published
by
icarus
on October 24, 2006
in Linux
. 0 Comments

It looks like the couple of Grub splash images I posted are attracting the most attention here (at this time ubuntu grub splash is ranking me the #1 hit…creepy since it’s just two simple images :)), so let us carry on with this theme and post up the instructions on how to make your own! You can find more detailed instructions on the GNU GRUB splashimage howto
We will use The Gimp for this example since it does an excellent job and is free so if you don’t have it all you need is time and bandwidth to get it!

  1. Make a new image that is 640×480, use the template to make it simple
  2. Do all the editing and whatnot until you have an image you wish to use, keep in mind that less then 16 colors will be in the finished product so don’t bother getting overly detailed
  3. Reduce image quallity to 14 colors through the image menu, Image -> Mode -> Indexed… and change the Maximum number of colors to 14 and click OK. If the image had a lot of detail with colors this is where it matters, if the image looks good lets save it as an XPM file with File -> Save as… and change the name so it ends with a .xpm (The Gimp defaults to save as the extension type) and gzip it up, this shouldn’t be required but some versions of Grub will only be able to use .xpm.gz images.
    gzip newimage.xpm
    and this line will compress it and add the .gz to the file.
    3a. An alternate way is to us image-magick from a terminal with a quick one liner for the whole processes
    convert -depth 14 -resize 640x480 image.jpg newimage.xpm & & gzip newimage.xpm
  4. We are nearly done! Save final gzipped image to /boot/grub and edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf) to use the image, the (hd) should be the same as your kernel
    splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
    Reboot and you should see your lovely image for the Grub menu, if not you did something wrong :p make sure the image is 640×480 and 14 colors and that the grub line entry is correct.

Guess I got a little carried away there…basicly, 640×480 14 color .xpm gziped image is all you need :D

Grub Colors

As a bonus you can change the colors of the menu to better match you image. The two lines you will want to edit/add to the menu.lst/grub.conf are
foreground=
background=
These numbers are in hexidecimal so you can either randomly plug in 6 letters/numbers from 0-9 and a-f, here’s a chart you can use as referance to simplify your life a little with this :D

Flash 9 available for Linux

Published
by
icarus
on October 19, 2006
in Linux
. 0 Comments

In case you don’t read any other Linux related sites, Flash 9 Plugin is available for download for Linux (and Windows Vista if you are beta testing that too). This is technically still marked as a beta but from what I’ve had a chance to use so far older Flash seems to work a lot faster and better but Flash 9 apps still have a slight performance problem, but still run really good.

Now I can play the Flash 9 games on at http://teagames.com and YouTube films have the audio in sync, yeah! Also found the stand alone player for Flash, not sure if this is new but it is to me! You can get them at the Adobe Labs Flash Player 9 downloads page.

Neverwinter Nights Platinum Editon script update

Published
by
icarus
on October 8, 2006
in Games and Linux
. 1 Comment

I have made a lot of changes to the install script for the Neverwinter Nights Platinum Editon installation script I’ve been working on. Hopefully it’s a little easier to now to install just the way you want with little or no extra configeration work.

Changes:

  • Added the patch 1.68 (final patch from Bioware)
  • Improved user support, you can now specify what user it install it as and it will change the driectory permissions to that user.
  • Probes the fstab for the CD-ROM
  • Automaticly creates a launch script in the install directory
  • Creates a Gnome menu launcher icon

This has been tested on xUbuntu with the CD version, if someone finds and errors in the install or quirks with another distro let me know so I can fix it up

Neverwinter Nights Platinum install script install-nwn.sh