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Customize The Jaguar Boot Screen

Posted by pudge on from the surprised-it-took-this-long dept.

peperone writes "I heard some complaints about the elimination of the familiar Happy Mac icon on a field of medium gray which used to greet us every time we fired up our Mac. Well, at least until 10.2. This site describes how to customize the boot screen. Fill in the old Happy Mac logo or create a new 128x128 image. Waiting for the first WinXP logos to be posted..." Cool. I made a startup image with the MacPerl icon.

9 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Uptime more important by mcwetboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Choosing your boot icon might be important if you actually saw it more than once or twice a month, but this is OS X here. I don't reboot my Mac unless it crashes (very seldom, under known circumstances) or I've installed something (security update) that requires a reboot --otherwise, it stays on (or in sleep mode). I don't want to see a boot icon, at least not very often.

    1. Re:Uptime more important by Knife_Edge · · Score: 3, Informative

      I am also one of those people. My experience with the iBook is that it can efficiently sleep for days at a time. I used to shut it down when away from power sources for a day or so. Then I tried leaving it on and it hardly drained the battery at all. Try it! I would never reboot if it weren't for Software Updates that force me to every now and then. Otherwise, it is unneccessary.

    2. Re:Uptime more important by Hes+Nikke · · Score: 2, Interesting
      or you can kill the boot screen altogether and do this:
      % sudo nvram boot-args="-v"
      now you can see what your machine is doing while it boots - juse like any other unix out there (i don't know if it works under Jaguer, but thats how it is in every other version of Mac OS X from DP3 through 10.1.5)

      (does anyone know how to format it to "set boot-args to debug=0x100" for getting my kernal panic back too?)
      --
      Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
  2. Neat by Knife_Edge · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is interesting. I wonder if people really miss the Happy Mac icon that much. True, this technique could be used to make any number of boot images. But it was certainly never developed until 10.2, when Happy Mac was removed. I find myself not missing it much at all. It only displays when I reboot, and that seldom happens. Current uptime is 10 days...

    1. Re:Neat by capmilk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I guess people are going to miss the Happy Mac for about as long as they missed the Picasso-esque illustration that could be seen until System 7 was renamed Mac OS. I really liked that illustration, but did not miss it for very long. The Happy Mac, well, no. I am not going to miss it. Clarus the dogcow is a different story. ;)

  3. raw coded in BootX? how rude! by frankie · · Score: 2

    Darn. Twiddling with raw hex in a boot file isn't nearly as convenient as pasting a new PICT resource in ResEdit. Maybe if I had a spare HD that I could afford to screw up, but this isn't worth trying on my livelihood Macs.

  4. Post Images? by mkiwi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought it might be nice for everyone to post their images on the web, I'd be interested to see what people put on their startup screens ;D

    http://homepage.mac.com/mkiwi/my-boot-image.jpg

    now i have a reason to restart my computer!

  5. More /. custimization by jbolden · · Score: 2

    As root type the following:
    nvram boot-args="-v"

    That lets you get useful stuff instead of a chewed up apple or a happy mac (same as command-v but the change it permanent).

    1. Re:More /. custimization by Cadre · · Score: 2

      Kernel junkies and real power users will want to just patch the kernel to boot up verbosely. Grab the force verbose patch here. :-)

      --
      All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.