Changing the boot text color

[hyperlife]

I want to change the text displayed during boot to green. Everything after the boot loader, and prior to x.

I havent found any info on it, but it was done on knoppix I recall.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

i am running Debian Etch 2.6.15

[mcreel]

You need to play with linuxrc, inside minirt.gz.

[hyperlife]

thanks, anything more specific?

[UnderScore]

thanks, anything more specific?

search this forum for linuxrc and then google search for bash shell and colors.

[davea0511]

thanks, anything more specific?

search this forum for linuxrc and then google search for bash shell and colors.

I did that and found next to nothing. After playing around with it for an hour or two I discovered it's pretty easy. I'm sure UnderScore and other could have answered this off the top of thier heads - I'm not sure why they don't. Anyway here it is, so we can check it off the list as something that's now well documented:

1) find minirt.gz (or minirt24.gz, etc depending on your version) in your boot directory
2) Bash commands:
gunzip minirt.gz (or minirt24.gz, etc) # extract the contents, it will extract as a single file
mkdir temp # create a temporary directory as a mount point for the file
mount -o loop minirt temp # mount the extracted contents into the 'temp' directory
vi temp/linuxrc # edit the bash script containing the boot sequence

3) while editing linuxrc (last step above) you should be able to easily locate the part you want to change. Save your changes.
4) umount temp
5) gzip -9 minirt (or minirt24, etc. - whatever the filename is)
6) You're done. If you were smart you did this to a copy of the original. Rename the original something else as a backup.

[maxIT]

Frankly I've extracted the 'linuxrc' from my 3.8.2 install and it looks like something poor:

#!/bin/sh
#
# $Id: linuxrc,v 1.11 2004/04/26 12:04:46 herbert Exp $

export PATH=/sbin:/bin

mount -nt proc proc proc
root=$(cat proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev)
echo 256 > proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev
mount -nt tmpfs tmpfs bin ||
        mount -nt ramfs ramfs bin
echo $root > bin/root

Maybe a useful file to hack is '/etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig'.
In it there is stuff like the colored kernel version prompt at boot:

KERNEL="$(uname -r)"
echo "${GREEN}Running Linux Kernel ${YELLOW}$KERNEL${GREEN}.${NORMAL}"