GRUB splashimage breaks text highlighting

[Luud]

Hi all,

I created my own grub splash file according to the guidelines in GRUB splash.

The grub splash image I created is a cloned version of the verbose background of the gensplash livecd-2006.1 theme. I simplified the main background to be completely black and have a purple bar at the right with the gentoo logo at the bottom. I replaced the text from "GENTOO LINUX 2006.1" into a identification of the host on which it runs such as "<hostname> server" or "<hostname> workstation. As I also use this for the gensplash themes I can always see on which machine I'm working when I hookup the computers to a single KVM switch.

The problem I'm facing now is that I do not see any highlighting of the selected line in the Grub menu. Luckily there is the cursor at the right so I know where I am in the menu. With other splash images for grub I do not have this problem. For example the provided splash.xpm.gz that comes with the grub installation works fine.

I even tried opening that file in GIMP, copy the layers from my own splash image into it and export it as xpm. Still no luck. Reducing to 14 colors or not does not seem to have any impact at all. (I actually looked at the splash.xpm.gz file to check it's color index table, however gimp didn't show me one. That file is in RGB mode. This does not seem to be very consistent with the documentation in the howto referenced above... ???)

Also, using foreground and background options in the grub.conf file do not seem to help (it's the highlighting that is gone, not just the colors).

To recap:

• Standard splash images work fine, menu images are highlighted.
  
• My own splash image breaks highlighting of the menu
  
• Changing the splash image for grub is the only difference between good and bad.

Anybody have an idea how to solve this or where I can look next?

Some references I used so far (albeit not all of them completely yet):

• GRUB wiki
  
• Grub website
  
• GRUB splash image howto
  
• Searching these forums has also not given me an answer, although it is possible I didn't find the right topic...

A related topic to my en deavour into beautifying the boot up process and the issues I face with gensplash and LUKS is here.
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"Great minds don't think alike. If they did, the patent office would only have about fifty inventions." - Wally