Introduction

While having a "splash screen" for the PXE portion of your workstation's boot process is not equivalent to kernel splash screen., it does hide a few lines, plus it gives you the chance to customise your boot screen to your liking.

Requirements

To have a splash screen in the PXE portion while booting, you will need to place these two files

• boot.msg
• splash.lss

in your /tftpboot/lts/kernel.version.dir

(Samples attached below to help you get started quickly)

Howto

Step 1

Edit /tftpboot/lts/2.4.26-ltsp-2/pxelinux.cfg/default and add these two lines, after "prompt 0":

display boot.msg
F1 boot.msg

(Samples attached below)

Step 2

In boot.msg, all you need is the following, which you can copy and paste everything between the #:

#copy below this line

  
 splash.lss

#copy until line above.

NB. The PXE standard is extremely finicky and those 3 lines were what worked for me. Or you can use the attached boot.msg provided.

Creating the picture

For splash.lss, which is a graphics file, in max 16 colours. (The recommended from my reading is 15 or even 14 colours.) The maximum and recommended size is 640 * 480. To create the splass.lss file is a rather long winded method.

• Create your image in gif,png, jpg (insert favourite picture format)
• use GIMP to save as ppm format
• use ppmtolss to convert to lss format (only available with syslinux package)

Links:

• http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~cet/wiul/
• http://sweb.cz/Frantisek.Rysanek/splash/isolinux-splash-HOWTO.html
• http://syslinux.zytor.com/

-- MohammedArafa - 26 Mar 2005

-- MohammedArafa - 31 Mar 2005

• boot.msg: boot.msg

• splash.lss: Sample splash.lss to start with

• splash.lss.penguin: splash.lss with penguin from the kernel.splash screen