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So I downloaded a grub theme off of gnome-look.org and it works amazingly well!

The only thing I don't understand about it is why after selecting what to boot into, a black box resembling a terminal(with no text) will appear in the middle of the screen before moving on with the boot process?

In the theme.txt file it mentions a terminal-box and even has font color and types defined, but there's no text that appears.

Is this meant to be a box for my boot text to show up on? If so, how would I do make that work?

Thanks for your time :)

bubbleblort
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1 Answers1

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It's perfectly normal for the black text box to appear empty. Sometimes it will show the "Loading" kernel version though:

Grub boot.gif

The purpose of the box is to show terminal messages before the kernel boots and mounts it's own screen with scrolling list of kernel messages.

In this example the "black box" background image was created as cut-out image of the main screen to make it less distracting.

Putting Boot Text into box

When you boot your first kernel (last installed version) no text is displayed in the box. When you boot older kernels:

  • The kernel version number is displayed
  • The text "Loading initial ramdisk" is displayed

Although you can write a script to update /boot/grub/grub.cfg it is easiest to simply edit it:

    echo    'Loading Linux 4.15.0-42-generic ...'
        linux   /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-42-generic root=UUID=b40b3925-70ef-447f-923e-1b05467c00e7 ro  noplymouth fastboot acpiphp.disable=1 pcie_aspm=force scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1 vt.handoff=7 i915.enable_guc_loading=1 i915.enable_guc_submission=1 i915.edp_vswing=2 nopti nospectre_v2 nospec
    echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
    initrd  /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-42-generic

Insert the two echo lines in front of the two existing lines.

Important: After you, or more often a system update, runs sudo update-grub the changes are lost and you will have to manually edit the file again.

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