Design your own boot menu with Grub Customizer

Troubleshooting

When you add a new theme using Grub Customizer, the software sometimes fails to comment out previous settings in the configuration menu. This can cause the original settings to collide with the settings defined through the theme. To disable the settings you don't need, open the GRUB configuration file as root using the nano /etc/default/grub command, and comment out the unnecessary lines, as shown in Listing 5.

Listing 5

Comment Out Unnecessary Settings

# export GRUB_COLOR_NORMAL="..."
# export GRUB_COLOR_HIGHLIGHT="..."
# GRUB_BACKGROUND="..."
# GRUB_FONT="..."

Alternatively, you can edit this file directly in Grub Customizer by clicking on advanced settings bottom right in the Appearance settings tab. In the dialog that follows, make your changes by setting or removing the check marks (Figure 4). You can also add your own GRUB parameters. A detailed explanation of the options is available online [4].

Figure 4: You can enable or disable all GRUB parameters in Grub Customizer's advanced settings.

On Fedora, the operating system may not accept new themes – in this case, only manual adjustments in the Appearance settings tab will help (Figure 5). If GRUB does not load the defined background image at startup, the problem might be that the image has a color depth greater than 8-bit. If necessary, check the color depth using the file command:

file image_filename.png
Figure 5: In addition to supporting themes, Grub Customizer also lets you customize the boot menu.

Conclusions

Customizing the GRUB boot menu can add clarity to the user experience, especially for computers with complex boot configurations. Grub Customizer saves you a huge amount of manual work – if your distribution supports it. But even if you have to adjust the settings manually, the result is often well worth the effort.

Infos

  1. GRUB themes: https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/109/ord/latest
  2. Theme preview: https://github.com/hartwork/grub2-theme-preview
  3. Grub Customizer: https://grub-customizer.en.uptodown.com/ubuntu
  4. GRUB Manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/grub.html

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