Grub Customizer

Font stays monospace, monocolor, lacks graphic and arrow characters

Asked by David Jonathan Bush

Greetings. I have a dual boot machine, Linux Mint Debian with Mate amd64, and WIndows 7 Home Premium. Before I installed grub-customizer from the latest tarball, I was using the Mint package startupmanager, which is now removed. Under the grub Customizer appearance tab, I chose the font Bitstream Vera Sans Roman size 13, white/transparent for normal, magenta/transparent for highlight. The preview image within the customizer gui shows the font looking like I want. When I boot, grub works, and shows my chosen background image, but the font is monospace, it is white/transparent for normal {EDIT: white on gray for highlight}, and the text-graphics characters that surround the OS choices, which are supposed to display the borders of a rectangle, instead show a rectangular character with a question mark within. The same thing happens with the up and down arrow characters that are supposed to display on the bottom of the grub screen, beneath the box. When I click on the advanced options in grub customizer, I see the following values listed. An X in the first column means "is active."

X GRUB_DEFAULT saved
X GRUB_TIMEOUT 8
X GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR `lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT quiet splash
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX vga=775 splash
   GRUB_BADRAM 0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef
   GRUB_TERMINAL console
X GRUB_GFXMODE 1920x1080
   GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID true
   GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY true
   GRUB_INIT_TUNE 480 440 1
X GRUB_MENU_PICTURE /home/david/Pictures/grub_background.jpg
X GRUB_COLOR_NORMAL white/black
X GRUB_COLOR_HIGHLIGHT magenta/black
X GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT true
   GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT 0
   GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY true

I have font color listed above, but not the font itself nor its size. Yes I saved my changes before I exited the customizer.

How can I get the font display to work the way I want? Thanks in advance.

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Grub Customizer Edit question
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Revision history for this message
Daniel Richter (danielrichter2007) said : 		#1

Is there an image at /boot/grub? If so, it should be removed. Grub 2 prefers it over configuration...

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David Jonathan Bush (twixtfanatic) said : 		#2

There were several files in /boot/grub with extension .img, and I renamed the following to .wasimg:

boot.img, diskboot.img, g2hdr.img, grldr.img, lnxboot.img

I left other files in that folder alone, including:

cdboot.img, core.img, grub.cfg, grubenv, kernel.img, pxeboot.img

On reboot, the same problem with the font display persists.

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Daniel Richter (danielrichter2007) said : 		#3

Oh no! Not this type of images. I was talking about pictures (jpg, png, ...)

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David Jonathan Bush (twixtfanatic) said : 		#4

There are no picture images directly in /boot/grub, although /boot/grub/splashimages contains 15 backgrounds in the format .xpm.gz

However, the background image is not the problem. When I boot, I see the background image I chose, in the resolution I chose.

The problem is the FONT I chose within the customizer GUI, Bitstream Vera Sans Roman size 13. When I was using the default font, whatever it was, the display looked okay. There was a large rectangular box superimposed on the grub background image. This box was created using text graphics characters: horizontal line characters for the top and bottom edges, vertical line characters for the left and right edges, and corner graphics characters for the four corners of the box. Inside this box was the list of possible OS choices to boot into. Below the box was a brief description of what to do, and this description included down arrow and up arrow characters. The font I saw for the list and the description was not monospace.

After I chose the Bitstream Vera Sans Roman size 13, which is also not a monospace font, the font looked alright within the small sample display region of the customizer gui. But when I rebooted, the font changed to a monospace font, and the line, corner, and arrow characters were all replaced by rectangular box characters with question marks inside them. I can still see my chosen background image, and the grub menu still works. The font display just looks terrible, is all.

I should mention that when I built the customizer, at some point it asked me what my preferred window manager was, and I selected mdm, since I use Mate for my desktop.

Is there some debug switch I can use during the build process, which would help provide info for tracking down this problem? Would you like to see the console output from the build session? Would you like me to use gdb?

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David Jonathan Bush (twixtfanatic) said : 		#5

I linked this to an existing bug

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Daniel Richter (danielrichter2007) said : 		#6

The preview is not rendered by grub because grub doesn't provide this feature. So it's not possible to remove the differences.

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David Jonathan Bush (twixtfanatic) said : 		#7

This is a bug in grub customizer. It is not a bug in grub. Please see the link to the bug.

Remove the differences? remove what from what? Do you say, the bug in grub customizer cannot be fixed?

Revision history for this message
Daniel Richter (danielrichter2007) said : 		#8

Yes. This is what I was trying to say: It's not possible this fix this bug.

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