Slackware Individual Packages

Okay, this is a little earlier than I was going to upload this stuff, but since you ask about it, I decided to upload some of the patches that I use for grub-0.97. I've been running a version that uses these(except for the 256-byte inode) for quite a long time now without any problems.

I actually have several patched versions of grub, but some of the changes are really too 'wild' for most Slacker types. Still this set is very stable and useful without being *so* intrusive. There are several graphics patches out there -this one has the best balance of features and includes patches to the docs. This version was originally done over at SuSE (IIRC) and was also used in Mandrake. It not only gives you the splash capability, but alos lets you resize the 'viewport' -that is the rectangle where the text entries show up.

here's a list of the patches:

01-cvs-sync.diff
02-splashimage.diff
03-xpmjunk.diff
04hidden-menu-tweak.diff
05-set-root.diff
06-ntfs.diff
07-256byte-inode.diff

I recommend that you use at least the cvs-sync diff, since the graphics diff is supposed to be applied after it. The cvs-sync patch is from debian and applies changes made by the grub developers after the release of 0.97. It's pretty small. The xpm-junk diff simply tries to ignore extra data at the beginning of xpm files. The set-root diff is one of several that I use which come from the grub4dos version of grub. The ntfs diff is from the same source. I have also used some of the other interesting diffs for grub4dos, but the others are quite hard to integrate with most other patches. The 256-byte inode diff is new and is being used by Slackware. I also have a whole bunch of other patches which fix gcc-4.x and other compiler warnings and security problems which were never integrated into the official branch.

I have also uploaded the slackware.xpm.gz splash screen that I use, and my grub menu.lst file. The menu.lst file contains some pretty good notes about how to use the viewport settings as well as setting up the font and background colors.

I hope you'll appreciate that I spent about 100 hours figuring out which patches would work, which should be used and adapting them so that they apply cleanly. Actually it was probably much longer than 100 hours!

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/amigolinux/download/AmigoProjects/AFX-GRUB/patches/

documented on: 2008-05-23, gnashley

> Would you please post a link to y our SlackBuild script too?
> P.S. I could not gunzip your slackware.xpm.gz file.

I don't have a slack build script for that, but here are the options I use to configure with:

--disable-auto-linux-mem-opt --disable-minix --disable-md5-password --disable-hercules --disable-serial --disable-packet-retransmission --enable-pci-direct --enable-preset-menu=preset_menu.lst

I have also compiled with diskless network boot support without problems, including support for several common ethernet cards. You may wish to leave out the pci-direct or linux-mem options.

As for the splashimage, the one I use is not compresssed -it just has the gz suffix. Apparently this is necessary for them to load. Some other images I have seen *are* compressed. Either way, they need the gz suffix. See the note above from osor about the 14 colors. I haven't tested many of these images lately -it has just occured to me that there may be a difference in the feature implementation so that with one patch the images can really be compressed and with another patch they cannot. Note that there have been three pretty distinct graphics patches among the different distros. Try using my image as-is to be sure there is not some other problem.

documented on: 2008-05-24, gnashley