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:

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

Kernel
Enable framebuffer console decorations:

Enable Keyboard support for framebuffer themes:

If you use either radeon, intel or nouveau drivers then you have a framebuffer capable driver which is well implemented into the operating system. For users with the binary nVidia or AMD driver, there are workarounds using uvensafb 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 livecd-2007.0. 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 you already use genkernel to generate your initramfs, then just change the configuration in to the theme you want to use. This is especially the case if you use any other compression method than gzip. Please see also Gentoo Linux Genkernel Guide

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. 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 natural_gentoo theme, a full list of parameters can be found in

External Resources

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