How to set a background image on GRUB

grub2images

Looking around on the internet I found a few screenshots of customized GRUB installations with a background image set, is that possible? How can I do that?

Best Answer

The Ubuntu wiki has a detailed guide. First, you need to make sure the image is in the right format: a 256-color non-indexed RGB JPEG. GRUB checks a number of different places for background settings, and it varies by version; here is the first place checked for two versions:

1.98

Open /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme, look for the WALLPAPER= line, and set it to the correct path:

WALLPAPER=/path/to/your/bg.jpg

1.99 and up

Open /etc/default/grub and add a new GRUB_BACKGROUND line:

GRUB_BACKGROUND=/path/to/your/bg.jpg

Update the grub configuration file:

update-grub

Related Solutions

Easy-to-use image-editing FLOSS

It depends what exactly do you need to do with your images...

If you want something like mspaint you could try Kolourpaint (from KDE)...

If you want process photos (change brightness/crop/etc) I'll recomend Digikam - it is digital album (like f-spot or picasa mentioned before) with lot of tools to change properities of photos - crop, change brightness, denoise etc...

Imagemagick: set IPTC parameters in jpeg image

Install the Perl package Image::ExifTool. It includes a command-line program called exiftool that can change EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and many other forms of image metadata:

$ exiftool -IPTC:caption="This is a great image" image.jpg

ExifTool understands a great many other tags as well.

There's a good chance that your OS has an ExifTool package already. It's in the Ubuntu package repository as libimage-exiftool-perl, in FreeBSD Ports as graphics/p5-Image-ExifTool, and in OS X Homebrew as exiftool, for example. The official site distributes Mac OS X and Windows standalone versions.

If you have cpanm on your system, the second easiest way to install exiftool is:

$ sudo cpanm Image::ExifTool

You can also install through cpan, which is only slightly more involved, once you get past all the questions it asks the first time you run it:

# cpan
cpan> install Image::ExifTool
cpan> exit

If you have neither cpanm nor cpan installed, even installing from source is not hard:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/E/EX/EXIFTOOL/Image-ExifTool-9.53.tar.gz
# tar xvf Image-ExifTool-9.53.tar.gz
# cd Image-ExifTool-9.53
# perl Makefile.PL
# make install

Run the program without arguments to get a detailed manual page.