Tired of watching screens full of hardware releated info scrolling past during Startup and shutdown? Welcome to the world of Splash Screens!

In earlier stages, the bootsplash screen was configured throught a lot of kernel hacking and using it has a hell lot of hardwork including recompilling of kernel. But the newest form SPLASHY in a userspace implementation of kernel so that it provides all the necessary features right at userspace.

In Debian, installing splashy is just a matter of few commands:

1) IF you don’t have unstable repo’s in your source list then follow it otherwise skip to step 3

echo "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo “deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list

2) then apt-get update

3) last apt-get install splashy splashy-themes

After this what you need to is just one thing

open your menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst)
and in the line with kernel value add these words at the end of that line

"vga=791 splash quiet"

Ex : - kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda8 ro vga=791 splash quiet

4)THIS STEP IS OPTIONAL
To run Splashy from initramfs you need to create a new initramfs image. An initramfs image is a little system that is launched during the kernel’s initalization, before the starts.

During Splashy’s installation Splashy sets everything up so you can get it integrated into initramfs whenever you wish by just running a single command. But first you must edit /etc/default/splashy and set ENABLE_INITRAMFS=1 so that Splashy will integrate itself into future initramfs images.

update-initramfs -u -t -k `uname -r`

then reboot and you will have a slashy desktop

ADVANCE SETTINGS

All the themes are by defaults installed in /etc/splashy/themes

configuration for splashy is in/etc/splashy/config.xml

and configuration for respective themes is available in /etc/splash/themes/ in XML file format some of the configuration’s that can be done include changing the colour theme as well as the progress bar size color direction and image shown.

TO CHANGE THEME

Once the theme is installed, just run splashy_config -s where name is the name of the theme

To get the complete list of all the splashy themes installed just type in

splashy_config --info

I hope this article will help you all.