

Fedora 17’s grub2 screen won’t be the ugly black and white thing you saw in Fedora 16. The reason for the ugliness in Fedora 16’s grub splash is that it was the first release we used grub2 and there were some missing files that prevented the theme from working at all. We punted on it because grub’s splash is not shown by default and we had higher-priority issues to work on for Fedora 16.

Spot and Peter Jones figured out how to get grub2 theming to work properly for Fedora 17 so we have this design now, put together as we hashed it out on the Fedora design team list. It’s using the background from Alexander Smirnov’s excellent fireworks design; the menu box is slightly modified from the grub2 default shipped theme (called ‘starfield.’)

I made a video showing it as well, but it’s shaky and nothing amazing. One thing visible in the video though – there’s a quick flicker before the graphical boot menu comes up, and after rebooting multiple times to try to read it Spot figured out it says something about a missing en.mo.gz locale file. If you have any ideas on how we can fix this issue, please let me know 🙂

Anyway, when Fedora 17 comes out, if you opt-in to displaying grub you’ll have something nicer to look at.