voidsplash: simple animated boot splash for runit

voidsplash provides a simple animated splash screen. Designed with voidlinux in mind, voidsplash should work anywhere runit is used as PID 1 and with minimal modification with any other init system. voidsplash does not require any modification to the kernel or the initramfs.

voidsplash displays invidual images on a framebuffer device during the boot process.

Dependencies

voidsplash requires a POSIX compatible shell (tested with dash), a working framebuffer device and fbv (an image viewer for the framebuffer).

On voidlinux:

# xbps-install -S fbv

Ensure that your framebuffer is working by running fbv on a virtual console with an image of your choice: (fbv should support png, jpeg and bmp depending on compile time options)

# fbv -cike image.png

Press q to exit fbv.

Installation

Automatic

Run the installation script install.sh. If the boot animation disappears after an update, execute autofix.sh to enable it again.

Manual

Copy voidsplash to /bin (alternatively, voidsplash can be installed anywhere but should be on the root partition so that it can be accessed before disks are mounted). Make sure that it is executable.

voidsplash should be executed as early in the boot process as possible. At the beginning of /etc/runit/1:

#!/bin/sh
/bin/voidsplash

It can also run on shutdown by executing it in the beginning of /etc/runit/3.

Create the directory /etc/voidsplash/. This will contain the frames to display while the system is booting.

Configuration

voidsplash can be configured by means of shell variables inside voidsplash. Current options are:

• SPEED sets the time, in seconds, to show each frame. This is an argument to sleep---fractional values may be used

• TARGET is the name of a process that voidsplash waits for. Once this process is running, voidsplash will exit. If this process does not exist or is not started at boot, voidsplash will only exit after timeout.

• TIMEOUT is the timeout in seconds.

Place individual frames in /etc/voidsplash. It is recommended that files are named sequentially (for example, void-0.png void-1.png void-2.png …). fbv will scale images to the size of the display without changing the aspect ratio. If you do not want black bars make sure that the images have the same aspect ratio as the monitor.

If you have an animated gif you wish to use, ImageMagick can be used to create individual frames:

$ convert void.gif -coalesce void.png

will create void-0.png void-1.png … with individual frames from void.gif.