Fbsplash

fbsplash is a Gentoo implementation of a Bootsplash screen to provide some eye candy during boot up or while working on a terminal without X. It is currently available in portage as.

Installation
You can install with the following command:

To also install the Gentoo themes which are also used on the Live CD/DVD:

And more themes with:

Many libraries need to be build with static libraries to be ready at boot, here is a list of USE flags which could be put into (03/07/2012):

Requirements
To use a splash image the kernel needs to support initramfs.

Kernel
Enable framebuffer console decorations:

Enable Keyboard support for framebuffer themes:

Using either radeon, intel or nouveau drivers provides a framebuffer capable device which is well implemented into the operating system. For users with the binary nVidia or AMD driver, there are workarounds using uvesafb to get frambuffer support.

Usage
General usage screnarios

Themes
The different themes are stored in where the folder represents the theme name. To test some of them on the console use:

This will change the theme on tty1 to natural_gentoo. You can choose any theme in that matches your current resolution. Now to see the theme go to tty1 by pressing ++. If you want to preview a theme in silent mode without reboot, then try

For more reference please refer to

Genkernel
If the initramfs is created using genkernel, the configuration in should be changed to the theme used.

Alternatively the could be used to configure the theme, which will be loaded after initramfs.

Append
To append the theme to an existing initramfs:

Generate
To create a new initramfs for our theme:

Copy
To create a new initramfs with the content of an existing one to add our theme:

Bootloader
In GRUB2 the parameters can be added to the variable GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in, then run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. For GRUB or other bootloaders check their manual pages on how to append to the kernel commandline. Example: Kernel parameters This enables the verbose version of the emerge-world theme, a full list of parameters can be found in. The parameter video=1920x1080 is optional, but will choose the proper resolution for the image.

Screenshot
To make screenshots of the framebuffer console, the tool can be used:



External Resources

 * - fbsplash homepage
 * - en.gentoo-wiki.com