Fedora Linux

timeout:

timeout=20

To turn the timeout off and wait indefinitely for the user to select the operating system, remove the timeout line from the file.

10.5.1.2. Using your own splash image

You can also customize or replace the boot image to include your company logo or a personalized message.

Use the GIMP graphics editor to create a 640x480 image. Reduce the number of colors by using the GIMP menu option Image>Mode>Indexed and selecting 14 colors.

When converting an existing image to 14 colors, the result may look better if you select the No Dithering option, especially if the original image contains large areas of solid color. If you are creating a new image, select the indexed mode before you start drawing. 

Save the image in the /boot/grub directory, using the file extension .xpm.gz .

Another way to generate a splash image is to convert an existing landscape-oriented digital photo or a desktop wallpaper file using the ImageMagick convert program:

# convert -resize 640x480 -colors 14 photo.jpg /boot/grub/new_splash.xpm.gz

Finally, edit the splashimage line to point to your new creation:

splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/new_splash.xpm.gz

An example of a modified splash image is shown in Figure 10-22 .

Figure 10-22. Modified splash image  

10.5.1.3. Creating additional boot entries

Creating additional boot entries is simply a matter of entering additional lines with the options that you want.

For example, you could create two separate entries for Fedora Coreone for runlevel 5 (GUI) and one for runlevel 3 (text mode):

title Fedora Core - Graphical Login ( 2.6.31-1.3420_fc6 )
 root (hd0,1)
 kernel /vmlinuz- 2.6.31-1.3420_fc6 ro root=/dev/main/root rhgb quiet
 initrd /initrd- 2.6.31-1.3420_fc6 .img
title Fedora Core - Text Login ( 2.6.31- 1.3420_fc6 )
 root (hd0,1)
 kernel /vmlinuz- 2.6.31-1.3420_fc6 ro root=/dev/main/root rhgb quiet 3
 initrd /initrd- 2.6.31-1.3420_fc6 .img

These two options are identical except for the descriptions on the title lines and the addition of the number 3 to the end of the kernel line for text-mode entry.

Installing a new kernel RPM will add an additional boot option and make it the default. If you are using yum to perform updating, a maximum of two versions of the kernel will be installed at once (configurable in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/installonlyn.conf), so old kernel versions and their corresponding GRUB entries may be removed from the menu by yum when updating.

10.5.1.4. Installing GRUB's boot record from Fedora

Anaconda normally installs the GRUB boot record on the first disk drive automatically.

There are two situations where it may be necessary to manually install GRUB on an existing system:

? When you're using a RAID 1 /boot partition, Anaconda will install the Grub boot record only on the first disk drive. Having a mirrored copy of /boot won't help if the first disk drive fails and you can't boot from the second drivea situation easily remedied by installing the GRUB boot record on the second drive as well.

? When your boot record is corrupted or overwritten by another program, such as an installer for another operating system, you may need to manually install the GRUB boot record again.

The easiest way to install GRUB is to use the grub-install script:

# grub-install --root-directory= /boot /dev/hda
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script Qgrub-install'.
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/hdb
(hd2) /dev/hdc
(hd3) /dev/sdb

The --root-directory argument specifies the root directory for the boot files and should be used only if /boot is a mount point for a separate boot partition. The drive argument at the end of the line ( /dev/hda ) specifies the hard drive that GRUB will be installed on.

grub-install uses Linux disk names, such as /dev/hdc, instead of Grub disk names such as (hd2).