Boot Themes

Details

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GoboLinux is flexible enough to offer you a choice of themes to control how your GoboLinux looks when starting up.

You can select a theme by setting BootTheme=<ThemeName> in /System/Settings/BootOptions. Available themes include:

  • CheckList - Shows tasks and others that depend on them, then checks them off.
  • Hat - A Red-Hat look-alike: lots of colored [ OK ]s and [FAILED]s are echoed as things are initialized.
  • Progress, Progress-II, or Progress-III - Fancy themes that stress your terminal with tons of escape codes.
  • Quotes - Prints short random quotes to indicate success or failure of every initialized item.
  • Slack - This theme is inspired by the feel of old-school Slackware boots: no distracting messages, no colors, no special effects.

Check /Programs/BootScripts/Current/Themes/ to see all the available themes.

You can use the TestBootTheme script to see how a boot theme looks like without actually rebooting your computer. TestBootTheme is described on section Testing a boot theme.

You can also set the boot theme from GRUB by adding BootTheme=<ThemeName> to the boot line. This can be handy if BootOptions file specifies a broken or nonexistent theme, because GoboLinux will not boot without a valid one.

Physically, a GoboLinux boot theme is a single script file located in /Programs/BootScripts/*<version>*/Themes.

The theme file is loaded by the boot scripts core, and is called once for every runlevel change. Although interesting stuff can be done in the script body, a compliant boot script has only to implement the following functions:

  • ThemeInit
  • ThemeFile
  • ThemeBefore
  • ThemeAfter
  • ThemeFinish

These functions are the hotspots that glue the theme and the boot scripts core together.