Re: CFT: Graphics support for /boot/loader

Matt Dawson wrote:
 > On Saturday 07 February 2009 18:59:43 Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > In fact I have prepared a theme with beastie; here's
 > > a screen shot (preliminary):
 > > 
 > > http://www.secnetix.de/olli/FreeBSD/vloader/screenshot5.png
 > 
 > Perfect. Clean, logical, concise, the three words I associate above all with 
 > FreeBSD. I would change all machines' loaders to this in a heartbeat, although 
 > others may have different ideas, which is where the space hopper comes in, I 
 > suppose. Nothing against the horned ball and your variant of the new graphics 
 > looks very neat and clean, but I'm used to having Beastie around. For some 
 > reason, this strikes the correct balance for me between nice graphics and too 
 > much "bling." My personal tastes only, naturally.
 > 
 > <crawl> That screenshot looks very professional. Well done, Oliver. Any chance 
 > of rolling another tarball with that theme for we traditionalists? Please? 
 > </crawl>

Good news:  I don't have to roll another tarball for that,
because this is quite easy to configure.

Please download the existing tarball and follow the
instructions that I posted.  Please verify that it works.
Then download the background image that contains beastie:

http://www.secnetix.de/olli/FreeBSD/vloader/background/beastie.pcx

Create a directory /boot/themes/beastie and save the image
as beastie.pcx in that directory.  Then create a text file
themes.conf in the same directory, containing these lines:

theme_background="/boot/themes/beastie/beastie.pcx"
theme_font="/boot/themes/default/stdfont"
theme_fgcolor="0 0 0"           # black
theme_bgcolor="255 255 255"     # white
theme_litcolor="255 64 32"      # bright red
theme_dimcolor="64 64 128"      # dark bluish grey
theme_options_xy="17 170"
theme_actions_xy="17 281"

Finally, change the beastie_theme line in /boot/loader.conf
like this:

beastie_theme="/boot/themes/beastie/theme.conf"

Done.

Of course, you can also use your own image if you want to
create one.  Just make sure it's 640 x 480 pixels at 4 bit
depth (16 colors maximum).  I recommend to use ppmtopcx
(from ports/graphics/netpbm), because I have used this
extensively for testing with my PCX decoder.  Also note
that there should be appropriate palette entries for the
text (e.g. black and white).  The code will try to use the
closest possible palette entry if there is no exact match
for the given RGB values.

There's ONE IMPORTANT THING I have to say:  I cannot take
credit for any of the artwork.  I am not an artist.  All of
the graphics images where taken from the FreeBSD website.
I only scaled and arranged it a little bit, adapted the
palette etc.  The only thing I created myself is the
proportional font; the "source code" is here:

http://www.secnetix.de/olli/FreeBSD/vloader/stdfont.txt

Modifying the font or creating a completely new font is
also very easy.  There's a tool that "compiles" the text
source code (like the one above) to binary format.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M.
Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606,  Geschäftsfuehrung:
secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün-
chen, HRB 125758,  Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart

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