HELP: MX Boot options

Boot options

Introduction

This MX Tool is designed to make common user start-up choices faster and easier. It is not intended to cover advanced boot options, for which the user should consult this Wiki page instead.

Options

Menu timeout: how long the GRUB screen remains visible until the boot process begins. If you put a zero in, the GRUB screen will simply not show at all (technically, it sets GRUB_TIMEOUT=0 in /etc/default/grub)

Boot To:  Select the grub boot menu entry that will be used as default on next boot.

Enable saving last boot choice:  Instruct grub to use whatever you last selected from the grub boot menu as the new default

Use flat menus:  Instructs grub to create a grub menu with the subcategories merged into the top level grub menu.

Background

Using the choices here, the user can select a background wallpaper for the standard GRUB display (technically, sets GRUB_BACKGROUND=/path/filename).

Complete GRUB themes are also available from the pull-down menu that offer a more polished look.

Splash

It is possible to see a graphical display while the system boots making use of the application Plymouth, originally developed by Fedora.

Enable:  Enable Plymouth.  Plymouth will be installed if necessary.

Theme:  Select a theme for Plymouth to use.

Preview:  Display the Plymouth theme selected.  The splash will be displayed for approximately 5 seconds then return to the mx-boot-options gui.  The preview button may not work upon first install of Plymouth but should work OK after a reboot of the machine.

Messages

Very Detailed:  Removes the “quiet” boot parameter, showing many normally hidden scrolling boot text messages.

Detailed:  The normal default boot message setup, with “quiet” enabled in the boot parameters.  This basically shows warnings and init messages, but not kernel messages.

Limited:  Hides all but error boot messages.

Display Log:  Displays the boot log appropriate for the current boot conditions.

MX Boot Options currently only works on the grub configuration installed with MX Linux.  It is possible, from  live-Media, to use MX Boot Options to configure the grub configurations on other “installed” partitions.

Tips and tricks

Create your own theme

So, you might be asking yourself: how can I create a splash theme?

Complicated answer: covered by a series of blog posts linked below.

Simpler answer: you use the example plymouth plugin script “script.script” located in /usr/share/plymouth/themes/script/. Example:

[script]

ImageDir=/usr/share/plymouth/themes/mx-linux ScriptFile=/usr/share/plymouth/themes/mx-linux/script.script

[script-env-vars]

example_env_var=example env var value

Simplest answer: you adapt one that already exists and works. This is what we have done to generate some of those in the beta splash theme package. Example:

NOTE: if you change any logo or background you must revise the *.plymouth file as indicated above.


v. 20180809