LILO Menu

This article is on changing the bootscreen from the sick red colored rectangle into your own custom bitmap.

Get a picture with a resolution of 640x480.
Fire up The Gimp and open that picture.
In The Gimp goto Image->Mode->Indexed.
Select "Generate optimum palette" and specify 256 colors. That will reduce your bitmap to the required specs.
Save the Picture as "Windows BMP Image".
Now open a console, su as root, and copy the bitmap to the directory "/boot"
Now cd into the directory and type "#lilo -E <filename>.bmp"
The different OS's will be displayed in a table on the bitmap (the table won't be shown). You have to specify the table's dimensions by giving the number of rows and columns. You can give number of columns as 1 (that's what I did). Select 'Layout'->'Dimensions'->and give the number of columns and rows. Next give the position of the table by selecting 'Layout'->'Position'->and specify the postion of the table in a screen of 24 rows and 80 columns. This is because only 24x80 characters can fit in the screen of 640x480 res. After that, select ->'Colors' and set the colors for the different choices. This is fairly self explanatory. 0 represents black and 255 represents white. You can choose any value you wish between these. I've chosen 120 for normal, 255 for highlighted and transparent for background. Then specify the Timer position and the Timer display color as well. After specifying everything, select Write and select yes. It will now create 2 files:
• <filename>.bmp
• <filename>.dat
Now cd into "/etc"

Make a backup of your lilo.conf file using


cp lilo.conf ./lilo-backup.conf

Open lilo.conf with a text editor.

Delete the line that says

message=/boot/boot_message.txt

You will have a comment line saying

#END LILO global section

Insert the following text just before it:

#Enabling graphical boot
map=/boot/map-bmp
install=/boot/boot-bmp.b
bitmap=/boot/''filename''.bmp

where filename is the name of your bitmap In this version of LILO you don't have to specify the colors and the table positions. It takes care of that in the filename.dat file.

After you have added the above lines, save it and come out of the editor. Now type "#lilo" and see if you get any errors. If you don't then I guess your lilo.conf file must be OK.

Make a boot disk if you can just to be on the safe side and then reboot. If all goes well then you should see your bitmap and the boot options.

Now this method worked for slackware 10.1. I don't know about the previous versions.

See also

• http://linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=174447