Grub EvoDevo is a configurable GRUB theme with scalable graphics, background blurring, and antialiased true-type fonts. Any wallpaper (e.g., your desktop wallpaper) can be used as theme background.
The style of the EvoDevo menu can be narrow or wide. A narrow-style menu has rounded corners, a header that can be colored independently, and rectangular entries without margins. A wide-style menu has square corners, no separate header, and rounded entries with left and right margins.
EvoDevo is configured by changing the value of variables in the installation script. The most important variables are screen width, screen height, and font size. All graphics are scaled as a function of font size, so the theme can be made to look good at any screen resolution. Menu colors, amount of blurring, dimensions, position, font family, and menu messages can also be configured.
These two screenshots show examples of narrow-style and wide-style menus.
The last screenshot shows what EvoDevo looks like with the provided default wallpaper and without any custom configuration except for screen width, screen height, and font size.
In all cases, the install script detects your GRUB menu entries and assigns emblems/icons to them automatically. If an entry distro is not recognized, it is assigned a hashbang (#) as emblem.
GRUB does not do font antialiasing natively, so EvoDevo uses a workaround to achieve non-pixelated menu entries. Everything in the EvoDevo menu is built from antialiased PNG files.
For each entry in your grub.cfg file, the install script builds a corresponding
SVG document with an entry emblem and the entry string. This SVG document is then
converted to a fake entry--a PNG picture that GRUB will display as if it were
an icon on the left side of each entry.
GRUB still displays the text of actual entries alongside the fake ones, however, so we mask the right side of the menu with a PNG image split from the background wallpaper. Also, we cover the borders around each fake entry by sandwiching the entries between two additional PNG layers. The bottom layer is just the menu background. The top layer is a duplicate of the bottom layer, except for a series of hollow contours that let the fake entries show through.
EvoDevo assumes that the GRUB updating command on your system is grub-mkconfig
(as on Arch and Debian, for example) and that your GRUB configuration file, grub.cfg,
is located at /boot/grub/.
Thus, Fedora, or more generally, any distribution that relies on grub2-mkconfig
instead of grub-mkconfig, is not supported.
Please note that supporting Fedora is a non-goal. The brave souls who would like to adapt EvoDevo to Fedora are welcome to fork the project :-)
EvoDevo has been tested successfully on Arch, elementary OS, and Kubuntu.
Aside from a functional POSIX system, EvoDevo requires:
-
ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick to resize, crop, and blur your chosen wallpaper.
-
rsvg-convert or Inkscape to convert SVG documents to PNG files. Of these two programs,
rsvg-convertis the most lightweight, and it may well be installed on your system without you knowing it. If you choose or need to installrsvg-convert, look for a package named along the lines oflibrsvgorlibrsvg2.
To configure the install script, you will need to know the width and height of your screen in pixels at boot time. These values must be those used by GRUB before your graphic driver is loaded, so do not try to read them from your desktop environment.
Instead, reboot your computer, and type c when the GRUB menu shows up. This
will open a command line with a prompt (>). Type videoinfo [Enter], and GRUB
will print a list of screen resolutions. The one used at boot time is prefixed
by an asterisk (*). For example, with this list:
0x000 320 x 200 x 32 (1280) Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8 pos: 16/8/0/24
0x006 320 x 240 x 32 (1280) Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8 pos: 16/8/0/24
0x007 320 x 200 x 32 (2560) Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8 pos: 16/8/0/24
* 0x008 1600 x 1200 x 32 (6400) Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8 pos: 16/8/0/24
0x009 1280 x 800 x 32 (5120) Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8 pos: 16/8/0/24
boot-time resolution is 1600 x 1200 pixels.
First, create a directory (say, "evodevo") somewhere on your computer.
Second, scroll back to the top of this page and have a look at the file tree. One of the files is called, evodevo.zip. This zip archive contains all that you need to install EvoDevo.
Right-click on evodevo.zip to open a context menu, and choose the "Open Link in New Tab" option. From this new tab, GitHub will give you the opportunity to download the raw archive by clicking on the Raw button or the associated download icon.
Once evodevo.zip saved on your computer, put it in the directory you just created, and unpack the archive:
unzip evodevo.zip
This will provide you with two shell scripts, install.sh and uninstall.sh,
and two subdirectories, data/ and wallpapers/. The data/ subdirectory
contains a list of SVG data needed to create entry emblems. The wallpapers/
subdirectory contains the default wallpaper.
Finally, make sure that the install and uninstall scripts are executable:
chmod u+x install.sh uninstall.sh
If you want to use your own wallpaper, add it to the wallpapers/ subdirectory.
Your wallpaper must be a valid JPG or PNG file. Its width and height should not
necessarily equal those of the screen at boot time, as the install script will
automatically resize your picture to the correct dimensions.
However, to avoid shape distortion, your wallpaper aspect ratio should preferably match that of the boot-time screen.
Important: if you have some JPG or PNG wallpaper file present in /boot/grub/,
move this file out of the way, or it may interfere with theme installation.
Before installing the theme as root, open install.sh in your favorite text
editor. The VARIABLE=VALUE assignments that need to be configured appear at
the start of the script, in the section titled:
# ------------------------------------------------------------
# CONFIGURATION
# ------------------------------------------------------------
Each assignment has a default value and is followed by comments (# ...)
designed to help you in configuring the theme. The most important assignments
are the first three ones (about ScreenWidth, ScreenHeight, and FontSize),
followed by the name of your wallpaper file (Wallpaper=...).
As a first pass, all of the other assignments could be left as is. Change their values only if you feel the need for it, previewing the changes at each step (as explained below).
Once done, run the install script it as root:
sudo ./install.sh
If everything goes well, the script will conclude with the following message:
-----------------------------
Theme installed successfully!
-----------------------------
You can now reboot your computer to see what the theme looks like.
Alternatively, if instead of rebooting you just want to preview
the results, you can use any image viewer to open:
/usr/share/grub/themes/evodevo/panel-back.png
/usr/share/grub/themes/evodevo/panel-front.png
and
/usr/share/grub/themes/evodevo/icons/*png
If you do not see this message, then something went wrong (and the script will
probably tell you what). A dependency may be missing, for example. The worst kind
of error would be to forget to quote a VALUE WITH BLANKS IN IT or to forget a
closing quote (as this would wreak havoc on the whole shell script).
Once you are satisfied with your configuration, reboot your computer to have the EvoDevo GRUB theme show up.
Depending on your distribution, using ImageMagick as PNG processor may lead to warning messages about a "deprecated convert command". These warning messages, however, do not impede theme installation.
In some rare cases, GRUB may not decode a wallpaper picture correctly. GRUB will then refuse to load the theme, falling back instead on the default text-based menu. It may be worth opening your wallpaper file in Gimp and check for bit depth and/or for the presence of interlacing on export. If everything fails, you may have no other choice than trying another wallpaper.
Grub EvoDevo adds custom classes (--class menuitem1, --class menuitem2,
...) to the menu entries in your grub.cfg file. These classes are used to
fetch the pictures/icons of the fake entries visible on the screen.
Hence, whenever your system overwrites grub.cfg (this will happen on any
GRUB or kernel update, for example), the custom classes will be wiped out
and if you do not reinstall EvoDevo, the fake entries will not show up
on reboot:
This may look scary, but the real entries are still there (hidden on the right side of the screen) and GRUB remains fully functional. Pressing the arrow keys, for example, will still move the focus up and down.
So you can just wait for your default entry to boot. After booting, you will
always be able to restore EvoDevo by running sudo ./install.
TLDR: Whenever your distribution updates GRUB, run sudo ./install.sh
to restore the theme.
Do check carefully, however, for the possibility of breaking changes in GRUB. Your distribution should keep you informed about these.
The theme can be uninstalled at any time by running sudo ./uninstall.sh.
The default wallpaper is a picture by Magda Ehlers, downloaded from pexels on July 12, 2026.
The emblems for Bodhi Linux, OpenSUSE, Parrot OS, and Vanilla OS were downloaded from the corresponding distribution/OS web sites.
The emblems for Apple, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mint, Ubuntu, Windows, as well as the camera, cog, memory, and power emblems, were downloaded from pictogrammers.
All of the other emblems were downloaded from Wikimedia Commons or custom made.
Emblems were simplified whenever needed to accommodate a reduced display size.
Thanks to Loric Brevet, Erik Koennecke, and David Niklas for their advice or help in testing the theme.
MIT