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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.
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But since I try to reboot about once in a month (due to upgrades), I won't see much of it :)
Now if they'd just come up with something to let me play Missile Command while my system boots... }:)
it's funny that the x-ray images are from a powerbook titanium G4. That thing uses a different bootloader, last I had SuSE on a mac.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/breakout.html
http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/index.html
How about (to make things a little more exciting) if you miss the ball without hitting n (a randomly selected number ) bricks, there is a 1 in 10 chance that your bootsector gets wiped.
It would really help increase average uptimes, as admins would find new and innovative ways to avoid having to reboot.
Linux would reach the tops of the Netcraft uptime chart in no time!
this is a pretty silly gimmick.
Unless of course you are a 31337 h4x0r and you need to make sure that your leetness is evident by displaying a graffito-style image during your notebooks boot cycle while you have it illegally patched into the pay phone from which you are hacking the defence servers.
Or of course, i suppose you could use it to display some sort of reminder to take this opportunity to grab yourself a bite to eat in the middle of your 20 hour coding sessions.
lysergically yours
Geesh... VGA mode -- which means you need some sort of support with your card (some old laptops don't).
:)
But how about doing it in TextMode, animating each group of characters? I think PC Tools did it with their on-screen Text-mode mouse pointer which actually looked like a mouse pointer.
Of course, having a Penguin on the first three or so lines of my screen in text mode all the time would help too.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
There is more info on the animated boot screen here with a nice large screenshot.
There is also a warning on the site for people planning on trying this out:
Before you try this, have a boot floppy ready. If something doesn't go as planned, you could RENDER YOUR SYSTEM UNBOOTABLE. You have been warned.
--Metrollica
Oh wait! let us play xbill on the boot screen. If Bill wins, the system boots Windows. If I win, I get my Linux back.
Ok, anyone who whines about slashdot reporting this software release should be shot.
I don't mean to sound as if I'm a pointless loser who tweaks the crap out of linux all day (uhh...) but I haven't had my jaw drop when looking at a screenshot for a LONG time (maybe since some early FVWM-XPM release (which later became E (by the way, anyone who bitches about E, enlightenment combined with nice free gui toolkits revolutionized the look of the linux desktop.. but E really gave it flair that many WMs have now.. anyway (too much parenthetical nesting))))
so this is one of those statements like the one on the aalib (ansi) quake page, which says, if you have to ask why, you are not a member of the intended audience
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
Great, now if there is a problem booting the OS, LILO can say:
"Error: could not boot OS. Do you want to play a game instead?"
That's user friendly.
Hey, I object to the comment "Be careful of the French".
We are just regular people you know, we eat crème brulée every day just like the rest of you, drink expensive red wine while making silly faces as any normal person would, use our regular quota of "Oh la vache!" and "Sacrebleu", have run-o' the mill girl names and our poo smells like rose just like everybody else's
So there!
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
You lucky, lucky bastard!
I can't even get mine to say more than "LI" =P
From what I can tell, it's only SuSE's particular version of LILO that will be able to use this by default. Are any of their hooks being rolled back in to the upstream source so that the rest of us don't need a help page to get this working? Personally, LILO is not something I want to mess around with too much.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Ha ha ha... Thanks for the laugh!
It's a pity that the links posted in the story point to the French version of my pages because I wrote them first in English. If you had taken a minute to try the little button in the top right corner of my pages (the one with the English/French flag), you would have seen that you can easily switch between the English and French versions.
Posting a link to the automatic translation of a page that was already translated from English to French is a nice way to waste your time... (but that's the point of these LILO boot screens anyway, so maybe you are not completely wrong).
-Raphaël
Linux has finally thrown that dagger at the heart of microsoft - Bloatware and Eye Candy.
You are aiming for the same end user as M$ here - this will surely strike fear into the evil empire.
;)
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I fart in your general direction! Your LILO was a hamster, and your kernel smelt of elderberries!
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
I am using the newest unstable/testing Debian :
/boot/breakout.boot is too big (> 65535 bytes)
;-)
Here's what I get when I try to install the Breakout (201195 bytes) on my laptop :
broomstick:~# lilo
Fatal:
I guess "something is rotten in the realm of Denmark"
Trolling using another account since 2005.
No I have to go out and buy some new hardware I don't need so that the drivers take longer to load, so that I can finish my game of break out before the boot is over. Maybe I could just fragment my hard drive...
On old Pyramid 90x hardware (anyone remember them?) you could play Space Invaders on the system console, in what was known as the Console Operating System (COS) while the kernel was running. If you played too long, the console buffer would fill and the system would crash.
In other words, when you won, everyone else on the system lost.
Yes, thanks for the reminder -- they can be devious and underhanded and take advantage of you when you're at your most vunerable ;)
Although I've used LILO for many years, I think at this point I've pretty much converted over to the GNU GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB).
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it. Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures. So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
GRUB also supports other systems by performing the traditional read-the-first-block-from-the-partition method using the chainloader command. This lets you boot other OSes whose filesystems GRUB doesn't understand.
Once you get past the arcane command syntax, GRUB turns out to be a wonderful tool. I recommend checking it out.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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
Word has it (if you install grub as an option) redhat 7.2 sports a nice looking background image in the os selection screen. But I'm a debian user so I wouldnt know. (tee hee)
is the sense of emptyness in the Linux world that the free availability has brought.
Even Linux needs a place for 64k demos that plays a tune and shows a cool plasma effect while a sinus scroller shows:
"Linux SuSE booter hacked by Triumph Greetings to...
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."
personally I just put a little bit of script into rc.6, so that every time i reboot it cat's the output of 'cookie' into the boot message.
Hey Presto, new proverb every time you reboot.
Hahahah indeed!
:)
Well that's egg on Timothys face, for neither the first nor the last time I fear.
Anyway, I very much doubt I will ever use your gimmick, it is, as you admit, a waste of time. But a clever one at least.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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
There is a screen of a gun. Press your mouse to play and pull the trigger. If the chamber has no bullet in it you will hear a click and boot into Linux. If it has a bullet in it, the gun will go off and you will boot into Windows. Do you want to play? (Y/N)
Oh yeah, that surely reminds me of my old Amiga 1000 - graphics, sound, sprites, simple vectors - and all in 1 boot sector! (yeah, I know - the data was on the last track on floppy but it surely looked great...
;)
Who knows, maybe someone will implement it on LILO or GRUB - it will surely be more fun to boot
Hetz (Heunique)
The site is slashdotted, so here are the link to the pictures and the text from the main page.
...). It gives a much greater flexibility than the other extensions that are provided by most of the other Linux distributions, including the new graphical modes that have recently been added to the official version of LILO 22.x.
pictures
green
blue
penguins
game
text
Animated splash screens for LILO
Introduction
Since mid-2001, most Linux distributions include some patched versions of LILO (the LInux LOader) that support VGA or VESA graphical modes and make it possible to have a nice background image while booting. Starting with SuSE Linux 7.2, the SuSE distribution includes an interesting extension to LILO that allows a programmer to define some callback functions that are triggered when some events occur (key pressed, timeout,
While testing the SuSE version of LILO and the helper program mkbootmsg, I was wondering if the timer callbacks together with the function that copies parts of the image to the screen could be used for creating animations. I quickly found out that it was indeed possible to enhance the boot screen with animations. Since my friends liked the results, I decided to share them on this web site.
These animated boot screens have been tested with SuSE Linux 7.2 and 7.3. They should also work with other Linux distributions, as long as you install the appropriate version of LILO. This is explained on my help page.
Why?
Several people told me that LILO was not designed to do this kind of things and asked me why I did this. So here are some reasons: because LILO was not designed to do this kind of things, because it is fun, because some people like to waste their time looking at pretty animations when their computer is booting.
Of course, these boot screens will not be so useful for those who keep their Linux server running for several months without rebooting (some of my servers have been running for more than a year). But these animations were not designed for these servers: they are more interesting for desktop computers that are rebooted from time to time. I created the first boot screens for a laptop that I boot and shut down at least once a day.
Animated boot screens
Click on one of these images to go to a separate page from which you can download the file to use with LILO as well as all source files.
xray-green
640x480, 256 colors (VESA)
Animations:
- progress bar (timeout)
- hard disk motor
- two flashing lights
xray-blue
640x480, 256 colors (VESA)
Animations:
- progress bar (timeout)
- hard disk motor
- two flashing lights
- rotating fan
penguins
640x480, 256 colors (VESA)
Animations:
- walking penguin at the bottom of the screen
- walking X-Mas penguin on top of the menu
- falling penguin (tumbler) for the LILO timeout
Special keys: F1, F2, F3 influence the penguins
breakout
640x480, 256 colors (VESA)
This is a full, playable game, not a simple animation.
Special keys:
- F1 for help
- F2 starts a game
- Shift and Ctrl control the bat
Copyright
I am releasing these animated boot screens under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or later (at your option).
This means that you are allowed to use, modify, copy and distribute them freely. You can even sell your own version if you want. But if you distribute them to others, then you must also distribute the source code for these boot screens. In this case, the "source code" ("the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it") means the configuration file(s) and the source of the image(s), including all layers and masks if applicable. It should be possible for those who get the source code to modify the animation easily, so distributing only the final PCX image is usually not sufficient because that would not be the the preferred form for making modifications to the image (unless you worked only on that bitmap file and painted it pixel by pixel, but then I pity you).
For more details, see the full text of the GPL (also available in HTML version from www.gnu.org).
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
It's a pity that you were moderated offtopic, because this was very much related to the LILO boot sreens.
Short explanation for those who haven't looked at my pages yet: the first two animated boot screens that I created were based on an X-Ray scan of an Apple Titanium G4 (because this was the only X-Ray image of a laptop that I could find). It would be nice to be able to animate the X-Ray scan of some x86 laptop because that would be more appropriate than the Apple Tibook, which does not use LILO.
-Raphaël
I'm going to get -infinity for this but, OK.
this is too much. crap like this, thrown in because it's "kewl", is why the real world doesn't take Linux seriously.
I want LILO to load my OS, and no more. I can wait until I boot to play games and see the pretty colors.
Then again, most users only see the LILO screen once every blue moon.
Now, installing the graphical LILO to boot my windows box, now that's entertaining!
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
Just a gzip'd 640x480 xpm, trivial to replace. VERY cool.
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it.
I never found that to be a deficiency in Lilo myself.
Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures.
Again, as a new stable distribution tested kernel (which is what I run on my workstation adn server boxes) comes out maybe twice a year, I frankly don't see the need for this.
So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
Indeed. Grub works well for testers. For the rest of us:
* Grub uses a completely different device syntax than my OS which I can't be bothered learning
* Grub has an arcane syntax if you do actually want some kind of interactive bootloader
Grub advocates also seem to miss two points:
* Grub has a pretty menu and can boot beyong cylinder 1024 / 8GB. Lilo has been able to do this for a couple of years too. Moot point.
* Grub complies to the `miltiboot specification'. Seeing as the Grub people wrote the `multiboot specification', who cares?
Mike