[How to] Create/change Porteus boot menu splash screen

[Rava]

^
Nice sounding PE Builder scripts... Are some of these available online?

In my book, the best Windoze software ever made is PEBuilder. 8) Oh, and cygwin.

[rara]

Yes, IrfanView is free for personal use. And it's quite a nifty little tool that punches way above its weight. Lightweight and talented. That's IrfanView for you. Oh yes, it's quite fast as well. Which makes it one of the top 10 windows software I must have on my computer.

Working more with Linux, especially including CLI and scripting, makes you a better PC user that just shifting the mouse and only working with clicky-colory [1] neat looking GUI...

I'd think the use of the term "better" is very highly subjective here. Better as in? More technical? Better at quickly getting things done by command line? Yes, all these can be termed better, for some. But definitely not for all.

Think about kids in Africa, farmers in south Asia, factory workers in south east Asia. They all need computers. A large number of them have it, and use it all day long. Do they accomplish their task with CLI? Bet they don't even know what it could be. They may have never heard about it. Are they not "better" users, or in other words are they "worse"?

The answer is as subjective as the question itself. Or the validity of the question itself.

What really needs be asked is - who do we work for? For ourselves (as in all the technical people in the Linux community)? Or for common people?

When we have answered that question correctly, we would need ask "What" do we want to do/achieve? Because this "what" depends on "for who"!

If we look at the computing history since the days of ENIAC; computers have only become more capable. Punching cards and feeding them, to them tracking our eye-ball movements, recognizing our voice and biometrics. They have only become more powerful, more capable. In the root of all this; have computers really become any smarter?

Well, no! Not really!! Computers are still as dumb. Tiny electric components flipping between one of only two states they could be in. But what certainly has changed is - the speed and magnitude at which they can do the same dumb task. But even bigger thing that has changed is - how do we use this ability of theirs (flip-floping between two states). That is - the software we have been using to harness their ability.

From hardware specific instruction set to cross-device to cross-OS to cross-programming language to write once run everywhere, our software have been improving the way they utilize the hardware. Why all this? So that we can still keep using CLI to get things done?

Consider this - Instead of using a GUI to configure my home management software I would like to use CLI. Now what? Could this be the case?

Run loop while true
cat /dev/camxx > tmpxx #Read camera feed
cat tmpxx | grep 'activity[abcxyz]' > tmpxy#Look for activity
cat tmpxy | wc 'activitya' > tmpxyz #Look for my arrival
# Turn on water heater
# Turn on living room air-conditioning
# Preheat microwave
# Pull food from the storage
# Heat 78 seconds at xxx degrees

... ... ...
... ... ...
... ... ...
... ... ...

End loop

Now we have two choices. We either practice and perfect our scripting to achieve desired results without error. Or just design a tool that allows me to create a workflow that triggers correct actions based on events captured on my camera?


I guess what I'm trying to say is - being CLI/scripting gurus makes us great! But there is a holier grail of greatness being pursued. That is - making things easy for 7.2 billion people

[rara]

Oh I should have mentioned that IrfanView is one darling tool of mine.

Code: Select all

irfanview /resize=(640,480) my_splash_image.jpg /convert=porteus.png 

That's all that I need to do to have my splash image without ever touching the GUI.

[Bogomips]

Little bit off topic here. When the chips are down, it's not the GUI that saves you, but [url=ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_VG94OdwI&spfreload=10]basic knowledge.[/url]