Blog de jeandamiendurand

I played a bit with the matrix theme at kde-look.org. And indeed, this was quite funny to see a (static, though) matrix image at early boot, then at system startup, and also as a KDE (which the desktop I am using) startup splash. I just miss the kdm background and desktop backgrounds and I'll have a consistent matrix in front of me!

Btw, I packaged it for debian:

#
## Fbsplash themes
#
deb http://jeandamiendurand.free.fr/debian/fbsplash-themes sid contrib
deb-src http://jeandamiendurand.free.fr/debian/fbsplash-themes sid contrib

Obviously I will try to packages others; and to fix at least this one.

There are three packages:
1 - matrix-fbsplash-theme
2 - matrix-grub-theme
3 - matrix-ksplash-theme

How to configure them:

1 - matrix-fbsplash-theme

If you want to see that at early bootup; then make sure you have the splashutils-initramfs package installed, change the /etc/splash/default link to point to the matrix directory:

ls -l /etc/splash/default
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2007-11-13 23:35 /etc/splash/default -> matrix

and reconfigure splashutils-initramfs:

splashutils-initramfs

If you want to see that at normal system boot, change your kernel command-line to have theme:matrix.

I know this is not really uniform; now I realise that; and I will try to fix it in the next releases of splashutils.

2 - matrix-grub-theme

You will need to replace grub with grub-gfxboot. Packages for i386 and amd64 are at: this page describing grub-gfxboot installation! Please take care, and make sure you reinstall grub as explained at this page! The deb location is:

# Grub gfx boot
deb http://www.nanolx.org/apt excelsior main

Then you will just have to add a line like (this is what I did):

grep gfx /boot/grub/menu.lst
gfxmenu (hd0,4)/boot/matrix-grub-theme.menu

Of course; you already know that GRUB counts from zero. I.e. on my machine this correspond to /dev/hda5.

Currently the default language is italien - oups! Press F2 to switch to english - I think I'll can fix that

3 - matrix-ksplash-theme

A bit easier. After login to KDE, go to the control center, Appearance & Themes, splash Screen, and select1apply Matrix-splash:

Waiting for a mature kamikaze patchset, I guess the version kamikaze5 is a good candidate. And its name, vipernicus, reminded to all of us very good time with the so-called viper patchsets!
So here we go, I have compiled it, uvesafb+smp+preemptible, enabled almsot eveyrthing except paravirtualization (did not compile on my box !?), and is available for i686 only, but with its source, here:

deb http://jeandamiendurand.free.fr/debian/kernel sid main
deb-src http://jeandamiendurand.free.fr/debian/kernel sid main

There are also nvidia, ndiswrapper and a recent rt2570 (as of date of this ticket). This kernel rocks. Please note that if you use uvesafb you will need to install the v86d package. See my splashutils page (link is at the left of this page). Enjoy.

Note: right now fbsplashd segfaults with suspend2, so hibernation seems broken - I'll have a look later

Edit: not reproduced. I tested hibernation and resume, works for me, with the splash. Please do never forget to remove modules that do not resume well. rt2570 (and you will have to stop/start its associated network in suspend2 configuration) is one of them - for me at least. So I persist: enjoy!