I know there are many people who do not like the slow development process of the Debian Linux Operating System (O.S) just like me. People who use stable distribution of Debian miss on lots of new feature-rich packages as compared to users of other Linux O.S. The reason why people still stick to the stable Debian system is because of its rock-solid stability.

One of the packages that is missing from the current Debian Stable release (Etch) is “splashy“.

Here are detailed instructions which explains how to install latest Splashy package on your Etch system:

Splashy is a native Debian package, so all you need to do is to download the current sources, untar and then build a .deb package from the untarred sources.

Step 1:
Go to http://packages.debian.org/source/lenny/splashy and download the three source files namely:

splashy_0.3.8-1.dsc
splashy_0.3.8.orig.tar.gz
splashy_0.3.8-1.diff.gz

into a folder say /usr/src/root/splashy_build

or you can use “wget” command also like this:
debian# wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/.../splashy...{dsc,tar.gz}

Step 2:
Give the following commands:
cd /usr/src/splashy_build
dpkg-source -x splashy*.dsc
cd splashy-VERSION (in this example, VERSION=3.8-1
debuild -uc -us
cd ..
dpkg -i splashy*.deb libsplashy*.deb
Step 3:
Test your splashy by giving command:

debian# splashy test
You should be able to see a Tux image and a progress bar.

Step 4:
Add the following line:
splash vga=791 quiet
in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file

Your line should read something like this:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-4-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/hda1 ro splash vga=791 quiet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-686
This will enable the splashy to start whenever you boot your system. Without the above line your splashy simply wouldn’t work.

What if you get error messages when you boot your system or you are not able to run splashy at all?
Don’t worry chances are that you will run into Splashy error messages on Debian Etch if you are not using an initrd/initramfs image.

Please refer to Issue #1 – Splashy not working; Splashy Error Messages during boot in my blog entry.

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