Slashdot Mirror
Animate Your LILO
clarkie.mg writes: "Most linux users still see the four letters LILO when booting the PC. It's now possible to have some cool graphics at boot time with the animated LILO. You can even play a game !" Be careful of the French.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Here are instructions on how to make your very own LILO boot screens.
;)
But to do this you need a few prerequisites.
... know what The GIMP is.
... have already installed and activated The GIMP.
... know how to accomplish simple drawing activities.
... have already installed the LILO Splash Screen Script-Fu.
... know how to activate the LILO Splash Screen Script-Fu.
... know what you want
--Metrollica
I have quickly edited my web pages to add the correct links. My web pages were designed to automatically give you the most appropriate version (depending on the language settings in your browser, as explained on this page). It's a pity that thimoty has posted the links that go to the French-only version of my pages.
The correct links should have been:
The site is hit rather badly by the Slashdot effect... You will have to be patient...
-Raphaël
Oops, sorry.... The third link should have been:
And I even looked at the Preview before posting... X-)
-Raphaël
AFAIK this is not SuSE-only, but they are among the first to have it in their distribution.
I've got a SuSE 7.3 installation with their default LILO stuff, it really looks nice - during bootup, while the kernel messages are scrolling in the middle of the screen, you have graphics around the borders, part of which is animated (top right corner in this case). More of the same during shutdown.
It may not be interesting for those chasing uptimes or using their box as servers, but for workstations that get switched off for the night (I don't want to hear that noise all night, and it lets me save the trees along the way) it's a nice display every day.
I've also seen reports on how to modify this display in some german magazine, can't remember wether it was c't or iX from Heise, or the Linux Magazin. It's been after SuSE 7.3 came out, but it's been a couple of months at least.
I had been using a program called BarBoot that was a hacked LILO which displayed animated flames at bootup. I guess that was quite a while back, say before Redhat 6.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, you do need the SuSE version of LILO because this is the only version that includes support for callback functions and timer events. This is mandatory for making the animations work. All other versions of LILO can only display static images and do not let you choose where the menu is displayed, how the keyboard input should be handled, and so on.
This is explained on my help page.
By the way, if you go to a SuSE mirror site to download the required packages, you will find:
Have fun, but please read the warnings on my help page before playing with LILO.
-Raphaël
I don't think you're right about that. I'm running Debian unstable, with lilo version 22.1 (package version 6) which matches the upstream's most stable. There's another poster who also is running this, and he can't get it to work. I'm not going to try tonight though, it's too late for me to be messing with the bootloader!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It's working on my laptop.
Install alien if you don't have it yet, then grab lilo.rpm from one of the SUSE mirrors the author of the eye candy pointed out above. I ran "alien lilo.rpm", then "dpkg -i lilo_21.7.5-55_i386.deb" because I wasn't familiar with the alien -i option...
It works, although my text is all squishy right now. It makes me consider getting the Linux Progress Patch (the homepage is currently fallow, it seems) and gdm or xdm just for uninterrupted graphics.
I think it could make my parents go "ooooh."
Here's a link for Mandrake users. Beware of the german ;-)
.bmp 640x480 max 128 colors
/usr/share/doc/lilo-/README.graphic.
Short instructions:
- make
- use bmp2mdk script
- edit lilo.conf
There are two examples. Have a look at
As far as hacking the DoD goes, talk to their admins. They have far shittier security than most decent-sized companies.
Arcane command syntax? Where? The best thing GRUB has going for it is the whole unix command line identity crisis. All of the keys that bash users are accustomed to are available from GRUB, including autocompletion. That said, how complicated is the syntax for booting from, say, that kernel you just built?
grub> kernel (hd0,0)/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage vga=5 idebus=66grub> boot
The partition synatx may be new, but I think 'arcane' is a little harsh. (hd0,0) means first bios disk, first partition. Pretty self-explanitory and logical.