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Hartwork Blog

Free Software, Music, Chinese Chess

Tool to preview Grub2 themes easily (using KVM)

The short version: To preview a Grub2 theme live does not have to be hard.

Hi! When I first wrote about a (potentially to lengthy) way to make a Grub2 theming playground in 2012, I was hoping that people would start throwing Gentoo Grub2 themes around so that it would become harder picking one rather than finding one. As you know, that didn't happen. Therefore, I am taken a few more steps now:

So this post is about that new tool: grub2-theme-preview. Basically, it does the steps I blogged about in 2012, automated:

  • Creates a sparse disk as a regular file
  • Adds a partition to it and formats using ext2
  • Installs Grub2, copies a theme of your choice and a config file to make it work
  • Starts KVM

That way, a theme creator can concentrate on the actual work on the theme. To give an example, to preview theme "Archxion" off GitHub as of today you could run:

git clone https://github.com/hartwork/grub2-theme-preview.git
git clone https://github.com/Generator/Grub2-themes.git
cd grub2-theme-preview
./grub2-theme-preview ../Grub2-themes/Archxion/

Once grub2-theme-preview has distutils/setuputils packaging and a Gentoo ebuild, that gets a bite easier, still. The current usage is:

# ./grub2-theme-preview --help
usage: grub2-theme-preview [-h] [--image] [--grub-cfg PATH] [--version] PATH

positional arguments:
  PATH             Path of theme directory (or image file) to preview

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --image          Preview a background image rather than a whole theme
  --grub-cfg PATH  Path grub.cfg file to apply
  --version        show program's version number and exit

Before using the tool, be warned that:

  • it is alpha/beta software that
  • needs root permissions in some part (calling sudo).
  • So I don't take any warranty for anything right now!

Here is what to expect from running

# ./grub2-theme-preview /usr/share/grub/themes/gutsblack-archlinux/

assuming you have grub2-themes/gutsblack-archlinux off the grub2-themes overlay installed with this grub.cfg file:

Another example using the --image switch for background-image-only themes, using a 640x480 rendering of vector remake of gentoo-cow:

The latter is a good candidate for that Grub2 version of media-gfx/grub- splashes I mentioned earlier. I'm looking forward to your patches and pull requests!