A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft | Hacker News Reader

A Grub theme in the style of Minecraft

github.com

395 pointssijmen69 comments

Friendly reminder that grub-mkconfig generates unnecessarily complicated grub.cfg files and that they can be as simple as this (which allows me to boot custom kernel, default kernel with initrd, and Windows):

    default=0
    timeout=3

    menuentry 'Custom Kernel' {
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod ext2
        set root='hd0,gpt6'
        echo    'Loading Linux 5.10.172zeus ...'
        linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.172zeus ro quiet rootfstype=ext4 root=/dev/sda6
    }

    menuentry 'Devuan GNU/Linux, with Linux 5.10.0-21-amd64' {
        insmod gzio
        if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod ext2
        set root='hd0,gpt6'
        echo    'Loading Linux 5.10.0-21-amd64 ...'
        linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-21-amd64 root=UUID=a788be97-7ba6-4c15-ad6e-e91d38604c39 ro  quiet
        echo    'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
        initrd  /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-21-amd64
    }

    menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager' {
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        set root='hd0,gpt1'
        if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,gpt1 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt1  4828-3FFF
        else
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 4828-3FFF
        fi
        chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
    }

Man I miss good old GRUB, which I guess is called GRUB legacy now? Most entries only required 4-5 lines of config and there was no ugly shell syntax, a million options, conditionals etc.

Probably just because I grew up with it, but MBR and disk/boot management on Linux was so much simpler back then.

512 bytes of partition table + bootloader(well, the bootstrapping part anyway). Partitions had one simple, 3 character name in /dev. No weird FAT32 partitions full of mysterious files, UEFI stuffed full of unnecessary features, but you can be damn sure a desktop or laptop board is gonna provide all the ones that make your life harder, and none of the actually useful ones.

I'm sure there are lots of good technical reasons why everything needs a UUID now, and so on and so forth, but none of all this complexity solved any problem I actually had in the before times. It just added the problem of now having to read a buttload of documentation every time I even think about touching this stuff.

At some point a few years back, I wanted to switch DNS servers on my laptop running some ubuntu derivative at the time. resolv.conf was still there, so I edited it. Nothing happened. Eventually I ended up finding like 4 different files in various places specifying DNS. And only one was the right one to change. Others might do nothing or actually break DNS.

One of these days I'll probably throw up my hands, put my mobo in legacy mode, and install some bare bones, Systemd free distro. Maybe Crux Linux or Slackware if those even exist still.

I'm using Slackware-current with manually maintained [edit: actually, I wrote a python script to generate it, see other comment] grub.cfg (grub 2.06) on a MBR system, and happy I don't have GPT. Recently I tried to convert a Windows installation from MBR to GPT. What a disaster, never doing that again (but if you do need to, use gdisk [1]. It's great, I had unrelated issues). I suppose I'll eventually have to convert my Linux PC to GPT when replacing the motherboard. I haven't ever reinstalled Slackware (I just upgrade), since switching to it in 2007. Honestly there are issues with that.

Slackware just celebrated its 30 year anniversary two days ago [2] and still going strong without systemd ;) Well actually it now has eudev, which is the small unintrusive part of systemd which a lot of software these days has as a dependency. Everything is still done with rc files. Best of both worlds.

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/mbr2gpt.html

[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/thirty-years-86196804 (There's nothing on the website or announce mailing list)

At the risk of sounding silly, the move to systemd and the headaches encountered, such as you describe, are the very reason I left my brand new system which could work well for Linux, including the graphics card, as a single boot windows machine.

It just wasn't worth the headache on top of having to keep windows for work (many programs don't have a Linux option nor do they work properly in wine etc, and vm isn't reasonable for gpu intensive operations like video editing).

IMHO, systemd really messed up the ecosystem and the "Trust" value that Linux in general had built with me.

Aside from the complexity of the autogenerated configuration file, is there any benefit to maintaining it yourself? I recall when I used to have a Windows partition, the 'update-grub' script included with Debian would find all kernels (including custom ones) and other OSes as well.

I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

Ditto, I'm not really worried about the complexity of my GRUB config - just that it works. It tends to if I don't go poking/looking directly at it.

Leaving them to manage the config has worked a-okay for me, even with a cmdline that would cause shudders in most. grubby has been a frustrating introduction

If I were to invest any effort in my bootloader at all, it would be to get closer to the 'metal' through systemd-boot/efibootmgr

TLDR: looking at the GRUB config invokes a "why am I still doing this" emotion, I'd rather not

Well I wish I didn't have to, but I ended up writing a small python script [1] to generate my grub.cfg boot entries (After 8 years I've forgotten many of the reasons for doing so). At least it's clearly inspectable and I can make customisations that won't be erased by regeneration. For example my root partition is a btrfs subvolume, but how does grub know which subvolume I want mounted as the root? The current one I assume, but what about my backup root on my HDD which isn't mounted? Or which alternative kernels in /boot?

[1] https://gist.github.com/rversteegen/32bb0b2786ee1092762627f0...

> I'd much rather have to maintain nothing rather than something.

The pain point is that when you can't boot for some reason, grub2 is significantly harder to reason about and fix than classic grub, lilo, systemd-boot, and so on.

There's not really any benefit, I was just surprised that after deleting most of the lines it still worked.

On Rocky Linux 8, I had to change GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT to "gfxterm", then it would pickup the GRUB_THEME value.

My kid uses Grub all the time to reboot into Windows to play Minecraft Bedrock Edition, this will boggle his mind.

My kids use the Linux bedrock launcher (unofficial). It's often a bit behind the latest release, but it runs much smoother than on Windows IMO.

https://github.com/minecraft-linux/appimage-builder/releases...

The only thing I don't like is your render distance is drastically limited. Under Linux I can only set it to 12 (I believe), whereas in Windows I can go all the way out to 51 if I so choose (which is useful when looking for end cities).

Minecraft has made this a bit confusing, but there are two completely independent implementations of minecraft, the java edition and the bedrock edition. The poster above you was referring to the bedrock edition for linux.

* The java edition has always had a fairly limited render distance, although recently they split render distance and simulation distance into separate options which allows for higher render distance than in the past. (There are also mods like bobby, but it wouldn't help you find end cities: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/bobby)

* Bedrock edition, designed to be capable to run on mobiles, has the ability to run very high render distances on pc.

>reboot into Windows to play Minecraft Bedrock Edition

And thus the "Extinguish" step is complete.

There are launchers on Flathub and Lutris for playing Bedrock Edition on Linux, but at the end of the day it was originally called Minecraft Windows 10 Edition.

Noted open source application…Minecraft?

The Java Edition is almost shared source as they’ve intentionally made it easy to decompile

Originally built on Java

I like the fact there are multiple splash tags even though "I use Arch BTW" is a great one.

For anyone else looking for the whole list, here it is:

https://github.com/Lxtharia/minegrub-theme/blob/main/resourc...

Totally missing "`date '+%Y'`: the year of the linux desktop"

"Now with Rust" hits hard.

I like the fact this is number one, on hn right now.

personally I'm a fan of "12345 is a bad password!" and "pls fix"

Naturally, the project couldn't miss having a "bug" report which asks to move the code to a different Git host.

https://github.com/Lxtharia/minegrub-theme/issues/18

I get the ideals are on point, but it doesn't look like the place to campaign about it.

Hopefully the author doesn't have any anxiety or issue about politely saying "The issue description doesn't look to me like a bug in my code." and closing it.

I'm reminded of the time when some kid wrote a script to crawl GitHub and create issues[1] about using inclusive language... except it was really dumb, for example: https://github.com/trekhleb/javascript-algorithms/pull/875/f...

[1] E.g.: https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/pu...

I agree that that’s a bit annoying but it is normal to use the Issues tab for feature requests and things like that. I guess that’s why it’s called Issues instead of Bugs

Figured it was worth mentioning that this guy also has a doom theme. https://github.com/Lxtharia/doomgrub-theme

Maybe a bit off topic, but does anyone know about themes or GUIs for LUKS password entry? The command line version has pretty unintuitive behaviour for family members which are used to modern GUIs.

With a little config you can do that using Plymouth, a number of themes for it have have custom themed LUKS prompts.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/plymouth https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-theme-luks/79792/2

Not something you could script up using https://help.gnome.org/users/zenity/3.32/password.html.en or similar?

That would require a full GTK installation in initramfs, which would be a bit heavy.

Ah, by GUI I assumed you meant something good indeed booted for hunting things like homes. For during the boot process for mounting an encrypted root, a TUI using something like dialog (https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html#screenshot and commonly available in Linux distributions standard repositories) would probably be more suited. IIRC it is what Debian use for their text installer. It should be pretty light weight, though it is still something you are scripting and adding to initramfs yourself so there may be more pre-made options that require less manual maintenance.

(hunting -> mounting - didn't notice until the edit option has expired)

Fedora does that automatically if encryption enabled on install.

Yeah go echo a below comment, unless something is broken Ubuntu and Fedora both do this already.

Plymouth? I tested it a long time ago but I can remember it having a password entry prompt.

I misread this as "Microsoft Grub Theme" and was definitely interested in the irony. This is super fun, though, and impressive. I didn't know you could do all this in a grub theme.

Now someone needs to write a renderer so that the world-background camera also spins around!

It would be a pretty fun project to write a CPU software rasterizer that works in UEFI… (Obviously GPUs are out of the question, but it might be possible to use multiple CPU cores)

Just scrolling a panorama along would probably look good enough

I think the real game uses a cubemap so the camera is inside a cube with six textured faces which I guess should be easy enough to render if you wanted to do it properly

systemd-ueficpuzd

.bootasset, can't forget the unit type :)

I kid, I'm generally fond of systemd - but there's so much

Is that even possible in Grub? Last time I checked there was a tool called "Burg" that would animate backgrounds like a gif, but otherwise it was very clunky and not a great experience.

This is really nice but I think I'll stick to this Fallout theme.

https://github.com/shvchk/fallout-grub-theme/tree/master

What is your favorite?

Ummmm ... what is grub? Didn't see any links to it from the three random grub2 repos I looked at.

GRUB is a common bootloader for Linux systems: it gives you a menu of boot options when you turn on your machine, and boots whichever installed operating system you choose.

So with this theme, that menu for choosing which OS to boot looks like the Minecraft menu!

Thanks!

I somehow read the title as a grub-themed minecraft and man was I ever confused.

I prefer the gameplay with the lilo skin enabled, personally

I thought it was a new Gruv Box theme. However, this is equally as cool.

I wonder if it would be possible to center the text in the buttons like actual Minecraft, or if Grub can only print left-aligned text.

How do you know someone is ~vegan~ on ARCH? Don't worry, they'll tell you.

This is pretty cool! Already downloaded & installed it.

It's been so long since I've battled grub configs that my first thought was that this is a minecraft theme making things look like food (grub).

Looks awesome!

I'll go get that later for my machine

Super cool !

Love it!

The original title from the document less ambiguously describes the content: “A Grub Theme in the style of Minecraft!”

Ah yes - we eventually changed this. (Just saw your comment now.) Thanks!

I'll never understand projects like this that don't include screenshots

This one does have a screenshot, though, in the usual spot in the readme.

As someone unfamiliar with grub, the screenshot leaves me with more questions than answers

GRUB is a bootloader. A bootloader takes care of getting the operating system started up. It is also responsible for allowing the user to select between multiple operating systems at boot.

Ohh I thought this was a minecraft mod

Are you sure you clicked on the right link? The screenshot is at the very top of the readme.

The top of the README is a screenshot

There is a screenshot in the README…

It does include a screenshot though?

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