Bootscreen: what about colour?

dp · 2003-08-08 17:43:10

[...]
[Starting SOMETHING ... DONE ]
[... BUSY ]
[Doing SOMETHING ... FAILED ]
[...]

what about having the DONE, BUSY and FAILED in green, yellow and red? ... as on my machine it goes so fast i cannot find the line that went wrong if everything is in grey ... on my SuSE-box (well it has a lot of disadvantages, but not on this part) the coulour indicaors helps to see what happened (you read the things faster)

how do they bring colour in this screen? (in suse there are no standard /etc/files --- that's the main reason i dont use it for work)

how can i color (my) archlinux bootscreen (and console-login-screens)? /// i mean coloring the text, not the background!

kritoke · 2003-08-08 17:50:39

I wouldn't mind knowing that myself. I prefer colour over black and white any day.

Kritoke

sarah31 · 2003-08-08 18:01:59

bootsplashes and colour in the boot process? for what reason you see the damn thing for mere seconds?

kritoke · 2003-08-08 18:16:48

It makes it all pretty, lol. Some of us like customizing our system way too much and there should be laws against it, heh.

Kritoke

dp · 2003-08-08 18:17:15

sarah31 wrote:

bootsplashes and colour in the boot process? for what reason you see the damn thing for mere seconds?

no, bootsplashes are only for the image of the distribution ... if it looks nice, more people would like it (i dont want bootsplashes in official-base at all!!!)

the other thing: color: i dont think it take any machine to color a string in green or red more than 1ns :-) ... and the visibility will be enhanced (the bootscreen in knoppix: this is too much color, but the bootscreen in archlinux: this is no color --- what about a middle-way?)

sarah31 · 2003-08-08 18:21:46

yes eye candy. some folks do seem to like it . me i am impartial as i try not to reboot regularily. like fonts...when i have trouble seeing fonts i change them...but that is really really rare.

Xentac · 2003-08-08 18:27:18

The code to make those "DONE", "BUSY", etc messages is pretty standard. They're all defined in /etc/rc.d/functions. I can't remember what you need to specify colours in bash for text... but those are the functions you want to change to get where you're going.

dp · 2003-08-08 18:32:18

eye candy ... what a nice word

well i use archlinux on a server (in the lab --- intranet) and on my laptop ... not rebooting the server every 5min is ok, but when you are using a laptop and booting in front of 100 people for a presentation, it makes some sence to have a nice bootsplash (else all not-unix-users mean you use a dos or something else prehistoric --- well at least they do not think you use the most popular one ... if you boot SuSE or RedHat, everybody knows that it is a modern linux-distro ... archlinux is one too, but dont look like this at boot

-> eye candies are worth much more to some people than the performance behind ... and again: today there is no performance problem adding 2 jpegs in the kernel and having some colours around

dp · 2003-08-08 19:06:17

Xentac wrote:

The code to make those "DONE", "BUSY", etc messages is pretty standard. They're all defined in /etc/rc.d/functions. I can't remember what you need to specify colours in bash for text... but those are the functions you want to change to get where you're going.

i found out:

you have to use escape-sequences ... here the link where i found details
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/l … ip-prompt/

Gyroplast · 2003-08-08 19:30:30

A patch for the current functions file can be found here now:
http://archlinux.veloxis.de/functions-color.patch

EDIT: No longer available there. Go to http://archlinux.veloxis.de/howtos/colo … olor.patch instead!

Use and edit at your leisure. To apply the patch do the following:
- gain root access
- change the working directory to /etc/rc.d
- run patch -p1 -i <location of patch file>

Easy as pie.

Xentac · 2003-08-08 19:45:14

Geez... I figured I would leave something as an exercise for the user

contrasutra · 2003-08-08 19:49:25

thanks Gyroplast, the patch worked great. :-D

dp · 2003-08-08 20:26:07

... aaahhh nice colours ...

terrapin · 2003-08-08 21:23:09

HUMMMMM...Green

dp · 2003-08-08 23:21:36

as the colors in booting are so nice now ... i wondered if it is possible to have some colors in the login-screens of the VC's ... of course it is ... but where are these functions in the system i dont know

(i mean the "Arch Linux 0.5 (Nova) ...")

Gyroplast · 2003-08-09 10:40:38

/etc/issue

You could have just grepped the /etc directory for "Arch Linux 0.5" to find that.

dp · 2003-08-09 12:03:44

Gyroplast wrote:

/etc/issue
You could have just grepped the /etc directory for "Arch Linux 0.5" to find that.

thank you for the help, and the advice (the only thing is: i'm afraid of calling commands on system-relevant dirs ... a typing error can be horrible: instead of grep -r "Arch Linux" /etc you can type rm -r /etc what can be the end of your config-files and the begining of a long weekend :-) )

... after trying to change the color: adding escape-sequences in /etc/issue do not work (the function that echos it is without "-e" i think) ... where can i find this function, and where it is called from?

Gyroplast · 2003-08-09 13:05:58

a typing error can be horrible: instead of grep -r "Arch Linux" /etc you can type rm -r /etc what can be the end of your config-files and the begining of a long weekend

You are afraid of typing rm -r /etc instead of grep -r "Arch Linux" /etc?! Come on now, that's about the cheapest excuse one can think of, especially since you don't need root privilegues to do that. If you're honest about this, may I suggest using a typewriter instead?

However, the /etc/issue is interpreted by the getty program, agetty in Arch, and does interpret ANSI codes. You just can't use the same escape sequence as in the the bash. Open your issue file with vim , change into insert mode and type CTRL+V, CTRL+ESC to generate the escape sequence. Don't let the inserted bracket fool you, you still have to add a normal open bracket after it, followed by the ANSI codes as usual. Check http://hints.ca.linuxfromscratch.org/hi … _logon.txt for some more info on this.

Greets,
Dennis

andy · 2003-08-09 13:23:15

About colors and eze candy in the startup :

I hacked rc.d/functions the other way round to not even show the state like "busy" etc. Just starting the various things and that's it ;-) .... nothing fancy

dp · 2003-08-09 14:30:41

Gyroplast wrote:

a typing error can be horrible: instead of grep -r "Arch Linux" /etc you can type rm -r /etc what can be the end of your config-files and the begining of a long weekend
You are afraid of typing rm -r /etc instead of grep -r "Arch Linux" /etc?! Come on now, that's about the cheapest excuse one can think of, especially since you don't need root privilegues to do that. If you're honest about this, may I suggest using a typewriter instead?

actually you do need root-privileges to grep everything in /etc, because some files are only for root to 'rw-' and to others '---' (and you get something like

grep -r "Arch" /etc/
grep: /etc/ppp/pap-secrets: Permission denied
grep: /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied
grep: /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem: Permission denied
grep: /etc/ssl/certs/ipop3d.pem: Permission denied
[...]

)
-------------------------------

Gyroplast wrote:

However, the /etc/issue is interpreted by the getty program, agetty in Arch, and does interpret ANSI codes. You just can't use the same escape sequence as in the the bash. Open your issue file with vim , change into insert mode and type CTRL+V, CTRL+ESC to generate the escape sequence. Don't let the inserted bracket fool you, you still have to add a normal open bracket after it, followed by the ANSI codes as usual. Check http://hints.ca.linuxfromscratch.org/hi … _logon.txt for some more info on this.

thanx for that hint ... to summarize the site behind that URL more or less in one sentence:

/etc/issue is interpreted by agetty and you have to use ANSI codes, and not bash escape sequences
[/code]

Arch Linux

#1 2003-08-08 17:43:10

Bootscreen: what about colour?

#2 2003-08-08 17:50:39

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#3 2003-08-08 18:01:59

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#4 2003-08-08 18:16:48

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#5 2003-08-08 18:17:15

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#6 2003-08-08 18:21:46

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#7 2003-08-08 18:27:18

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#8 2003-08-08 18:32:18

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#9 2003-08-08 19:06:17

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#10 2003-08-08 19:30:30

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#11 2003-08-08 19:45:14

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#12 2003-08-08 19:49:25

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#13 2003-08-08 20:26:07

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#14 2003-08-08 21:23:09

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#15 2003-08-08 23:21:36

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#16 2003-08-09 10:40:38

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#17 2003-08-09 12:03:44

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#18 2003-08-09 13:05:58

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#19 2003-08-09 13:23:15

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

#20 2003-08-09 14:30:41

Re: Bootscreen: what about colour?

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