Easter Egg in OpenSUSE Grub

Yesterday I booted my laptop while shaking it. First I saw some error messages saying something like “not enough memory”. Then amazing things happened. A beautiful grub boot screen came into my eye. It’s a snowy background with several penguins running around. I’m impressed! After booting into my system, I decided to find out what actually happened.

opensuse grub uses a gfxmenu option in menu.list to set the colorful boot menus. In my case,

gfxmenu (hd0,2)/message
So I need to open (hd0,2)/message to see what's inside.
$cp /boot/message ~/test/grub/
$cpio -i <>

Good, let’s first see the about file

$cat pabout.txt
Penguin theme originally made by Raphael Quinet
(http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/).
Modernized for openSUSE by Steffen Winterfeldt.

Like it or hate it? Edit gfxboot.cfg in /boot/message
to have it always or to get rid of it.

So gfxboot.cfg next. I found an option setting penguin theme there.

; penguin theme likelihood (in percent, -1 = auto)
penguin=0

Wow, the likelihood is set 0, which explains why I didn’t see the theme before. I must be so lucky that my shaking hands made grub to read the bit wrongly and presented the penguin theme to me. What a lucky dog I am!

I really like the penguin grub theme. So I decided to have it always by setting penguin likelihood to 100. and then reinstall the picture. Of course don’t forget to delete the original message before archiving the new one.

penguin=100
$rm message
$find ./ -print | cpio -ov > message
./
./message
./16x16.fnt
./back.jpg
./en.hlp
./en.tr
./gfxboot.cfg
./init
./lang
./languages
./pabout.txt
./panim_a.jpg
./panim.jpg
./pback.jpg
./phead.jpg
./timer_a.jpg
./translations.en
835 blocks
$mv message /boot/

OK, let me reboot to see the new grub theme.

For those who want to try opensuse grub, please download from the official repository. To install grub in command line, see here. Of course root privilege is needed.