~#nixy

Now, ever since the new FreeBSD logo was concieved, we have had to deal with the cumbersome “Free BSD” ascii art on our boot screens.

But not anymore! In one of my general fits of boredom, I went into /boot/ and had a look through the files. Always remember to familiarize yourself with your operating system, even if you’ve been running it for ages.

In /boot/beastie.4th, there’s some ascii art. One looks like a colored beastie, the other like a monotone beastie, and a third is the ASCII art text. Now, shouldn’t there be some configuration switch to change this behaviour as it fits us? Sure thing!

Just grep /boot/defaults/loader.conf after “logo”. grep logo /boot/defaults/loader.conf, and voilá!

[alive@p0rnteddy /boot]$ grep logo defaults/loader.conf
#loader_logo="fbsdbw"           # Desired logo: fbsdbw, beastiebw, beastie, none

See, you can even remove the logo altogether, or hack the beastie.4th file to include your own. Just remember to make sure it fits on the screen – I don’t even know what would happen if it didn’t; Haven’t been stupid enough to test.

Anyway, the colored beastie, while a nice feature, requires tweaking – as it looks ugly to my eyes. Open up your /boot/loader.conf and write loader_logo="beastiebw".

Reboot your system and enjoy the sight.