[ale] Laptop Security Trick

[Paul Cartwright]

On Fri October 7 2005 10:52 pm, Mike Harrison wrote:
> -Which reminds me I need to do that to my machines again..
> and you may want to as well.
>
> I'll save you the googling how to make the image:
>
> http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/current/jayanth.html
rather than sending people to a web page, here is the HOW-TO:

   Customizing the splash image in GRUB
Submitted by c_r_jayanth on Friday, November 7, 2003 - 10:46
	
 

Customizing the splash image in GRUB

The splash image is the image shown in the background when GRUB (the 
GRand Unified Bootloader) is displaying the list of operating systems 
you can boot. Typically, this is the corporate logo of your Linux 
distribution. But its very simple to customize it to an image of your 
choice. All you need is the GIMP and gzip. My GIMP version is 1.2. 
Even older versions may do the job.

Here's how:(You need to have root access)
1)Start the GIMP.
2)Click on File->New or type Ctrl+N
3)In the new image dialog, change Width to 640 pixels and Height to 480 
pixels. (The image should be of size 640x480 pixels.) Now click OK.
4)Create the image which you would like to be the splash image. It's 
quite fun to experiment with the various tools of the GIMP!
5)After you have finished creating the image, hit Alt+i or right click 
on the image and click on Image->Mode->Indexed...
6)In the Indexed Color Conversion dialog that appears, click on the 
radio button "Generate optimal Palette" and in "# of colors" enter 14. 
Click OK.(The image should be of only 14 colors)
7)Now right-click on the image and click on File->Save As...Save the 
file as splash.xpm in a directory of your choice.
8)Now open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you 
have saved splash.xpm
9)Now key in gzip splash.xpm
10)You will find that a file named splash.xpm.gz is created in the 
directory where splash.xpm used to exist.
11)Copy this splash.xpm.gz to the /boot/grub directory. You may want to 
back up the pre-existing splash.xpm.gz file in the /boot/grub 
directory first.

That's it! When you reboot, you will find your image in the background, 
with the menu of operating systems etc. in the foreground.

Of course, this is not the only way to change the image, but it is a 
very simple one.
-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800