Customizing the splash image in GRUB

The splash image is the image shown in the background when GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader) is displaying the list of operating systems you can boot. Typically, this is the corporate logo of your Linux distribution. But its very simple to customize it to an image of your choice. All you need is the GIMP and gzip. My GIMP version is 1.2. Even older versions may do the job.

Here's how:(You need to have root access)
1)Start the GIMP.
2)Click on File->New or type Ctrl+N
3)In the new image dialog, change Width to 640 pixels and Height to 480 pixels. (The image should be of size 640x480 pixels.) Now click OK.
4)Create the image which you would like to be the splash image. It's quite fun to experiment with the various tools of the GIMP!
5)After you have finished creating the image, hit Alt+i or right click on the image and click on Image->Mode->Indexed...
6)In the Indexed Color Conversion dialog that appears, click on the radio button "Generate optimal Palette" and in "# of colors" enter 14. Click OK.(The image should be of only 14 colors)
7)Now right-click on the image and click on File->Save As...Save the file as splash.xpm in a directory of your choice.
8)Now open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you have saved splash.xpm
9)Now key in gzip splash.xpm
10)You will find that a file named splash.xpm.gz is created in the directory where splash.xpm used to exist.
11)Copy this splash.xpm.gz to the /boot/grub directory. You may want to back up the pre-existing splash.xpm.gz file in the /boot/grub directory first.

That's it! When you reboot, you will find your image in the background, with the menu of operating systems etc. in the foreground.

Of course, this is not the only way to change the image, but it is a very simple one.