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.