The Full Darksouls Experience:

> Dark Souls Grub <	Plymouth Loading Menu

Grub Souls III

A GRUB theme inspired by the Dark Souls series.

Installation

• Clone or download the theme repository:

git clone https://github.com/PedroMMarinho/grubsouls-theme.git

Manually

If you prefer to install the theme manually:

• (optional) Before you copy the theme you can:

  • Choose any background you'd like:

    # Run the script
    ./choose_background.sh
    # Or copy a custom image to grubsouls/background.png

  • The script will allow you to choose an image from background_galery. If you do not want to run the script, you can always copy any image from that folder to use as background.

  • For alternate backgrounds on boot, copy the images you'd like to shuffle to grubsouls/backgrounds. This requires an extra step so checkout the Configuration section.

• Check your GRUB directory:

  • Usually one of:
    • /boot/grub
    • /boot/grub2

• Copy the theme to GRUB themes directory

  cd grubsouls-theme/
  sudo cp -r ./grubsouls $(GRUB_DIR)/themes/

• Edit GRUB configuration

  • Open /etc/default/grub with a text editor and add or modify the line:

    GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub/themes/grubsouls/theme.txt"
    

• Finally update your grub config by running

  sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

• And that's it. You are good to go.

Using the Script

• Run the installation script as root:

sudo ./install_theme.sh

• This will make it easier to install the theme, the background update and the console background.

Configuration

Adjusting Height and Width for a different amount of boot options:

• If you have more than 4 boot options, the next entries won't be visible. If you want see all of them at once you can change this line in the file theme.txt. There is a formula inside the file to guide you on that.

• If you have a boot entries with a large names you might need to change the width of the boot_menu. For that you can change this line.

Changing the names and classes of the boot entries:

• If you want to change the name of the boot entries, however, what you can do is use a custom file with all the menu entries, and change their name. What I've done is:

  • DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, if you miss something you might break your boot.

    • Go to where your grub.cfg file is located and check all the menu entries you have.

    • Copy all the entries you want to edit and put them into the file 40_custom located in /etc/grub.d/. If that file does not exist create a new executable that will be loaded into the grub.cfg. Be sure to copy them correctly, if not you might break your boot system.

    • After that, you should disable the files that are generating the entries so you don't get duplicates.

    • My arch entry starts like this: menuentry 'Champion of Ash' --class arch. 'Champion of Ash' is the name of the entry, you can change that to whatever you'd like. The class is important so the icon that is on the left of the entry changes. As the name is arch, grub will look into the icons folder if there is an arch.png and will use it.

    • Finally don't forget to regenerate the grub.cfg by running:

      sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reiterating Lxtharia

Setting the console background

When in grub, pressing 'c' opens the grub console. If you want that console to have a background you can specify GRUB_BACKGROUND=<path> in /etc/defaults/grub

# Create a backup of the file first
cp /etc/grub.d/00_header ./00_header.bak
# replace the elif in that line with an fi; if
sed --in-place -E 's/(.*)elif(.*"x\$GRUB_BACKGROUND" != x ] && [ -f "\$GRUB_BACKGROUND" ].*)/\1fi; if\2/' /etc/grub.d/00_header

Now you can set:

GRUB_BACKGROUND="/boot/grub/themes/minegrub/terminal_background.png"

And don't forget to regenerate the grub.cfg.

Updating background and "x Bosses Slain" text after every boot

The update_theme.py script updates the amount of packages currently installed and randomly chooses a file from the folder backgrounds/ as the background image.

For this to work make sure you have:

• fastfetch or neofetch is installed
• Simple Python 3 (or other variation) installation
• Put all backgrounds you want to randomly choose from in ./grubsouls/backgrounds/. You can also add your own images :)
• If you want a certain background to be used on the next boot you can run python update_theme.py <BACKGROUND_FILE_NAME>

To have this automatically running you'll to do the following:

For systemd

• Edit ./grubsouls-update.service to use /boot/grub2/ if necessary.

• Copy ./grubsouls-update.service to /etc/systemd/system.

• Enable the service: systemctl enable grubsouls-update.service

• If for some reason it does not update after boot you can run systemctl status grubsouls-update.service and check for errors.

A Big Thanks to

• Lxtharia for sharing his work Minegrub (Helped a ton for development reference!!!)
• This beatifull collection of themes that also inspired me and helped me learn (https://github.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB)
• Documentation of course (http://web.archive.org/web/20241209100014/http://wiki.rosalab.ru/en/index.php/Grub2_theme_tutorial), (https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Theme-file-format.html).