There's nothing much to it really, you can use just about any photo, drawing or digital artwork.
You can use a picture of your favorite girl / boy / dog / cat / horse / car / motorbike / truck / boat / airplane, the biggest fish you ever caught, your company's logo, almost anything you like.
1) First, right-click on the image file and click 'properties', or open the image with Image Viewer and find out how many pixels it has.
2) For best results you should try to choose an image file that will match the shape of your monitor.
For example, if your monitor is 1050x780 pixels, that's about 3/4 as high as it is wide.
If you want your image to fill the whole screen and you don't want part of it cut off, you need to use an image that's about 3/4 as high as it is wide, so it will fit your monitor properly.
3) Also see
How To Change Boot Menu Resolution
TIP: If you really want to use an image that doesn't fit, first make a copy of it.
Never alter your original image because you won't be able to reverse the changes ones they've been saved.
Open the copy of your image with GIMP image editor in Ubuntu.
Crop and/or resize the copy of your image to make it fit your monitor if you need to.
4) Currently GRUB 2 supports three image formats, they are: .png, .tga and .jpg.
Everyone should be able to use the .png and .tge images without any problems. If you want to use a .jpg image you can, but you probably need to use the insmod command to insert the module for that first.
The module for that is called jpeg.mod, see the
insmod command.
You'll need to add the insmod command to your grub.cfg by editing
/etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme.
While you have that file open you'll probably need to add '.jpg' as an image format in line 16 or 17 too.
If you don't want to do it that way, the alternative is to convert the image to .png or .tga. You can do that by opening your image in GIMP and clicking 'save as', and type a file name of your choice with a .png or .tga filename extension after it. That will make a copy of your image in the format you want.
5) Copy your image file to your /boot/grub/ directory,
| sudo cp myimage.png /boot/grub/ |
Where: 'myimage' is replaced with the file name of your own image file.
6) To get your new splashimage to appear, you need to edit a file called /etc/grub/
05_debian_theme.
| gksudo gedit /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme |
7) scroll down in the file until you find line 16 or 17
8) change the following code from:
| for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base}/moreblue-orbit-grub.{png,tga} ; do |
to replace '
moreblue-orbit-grub' with the name of your own splashimage)
| for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base}/myimage.{png,tga} ; do |
NOTE: Be careful to keep the dot in the filename! eg: '
myimage.'
Save and close the file.
9) Run grub-mkconfig (Karmic Koala), or update-grub (in earlier versions of Ubuntu), to write the changes to grub-conf,
| sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg |
10) That's it! All done! Now you can reboot and see how it looks!
