Fbcondecor alternatives

[provision]

This tool and kernel patch quietly died and seems like it was never resurrected:


https://github.com/jirka-grunt/fbcondecor

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they become outdated quickly and attract opinion-based answers. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve. Share your research. Here are a few suggestions on how to properly ask this type of question.

Closed yesterday.




This tool and kernel patch quietly died and seems like it was never resurrected:


https://github.com/jirka-grunt/fbcondecor


This whole thing completely died out since the early 5.x kernels for 6.x I don't know anything alike.

You could change the background of any deep consoles (ttys) with:

splash -s -u $i /etc/bootsplash/themes/tty$i/config/bootsplash-1024x768.cfg &> /dev/null


This used the mentioned kernel patch. Even tho the fbsplash is still present in some distros without that kernel patch it will never work.


Anyone found an alternative for this?

 

[JasKinasis]

I have no idea. I've never used it.
Is it possible that the patch has been accepted into the mainstream kernel for later versions?
Or maybe there is a more acceptable way of doing this already built into the kernel?

It might be worth trying to message the person who was maintaining the github repo for the patch. But from reading the information in the README.md - it seems that they are not the original author of the patch and do not understand it. So..... I honestly don't know what to suggest.

 

[provision]

LoL if you don't know why even bother responding?
This whole concept died out because people these days don't use the deep consoles anymore fancy bootsplash yeah that is doable in any distros then they login to X via gdm and don't touch console anymore.
Just sad for console lovers.

 

[JasKinasis]

LoL if you don't know why even bother responding?
This whole concept died out because people these days don't use the deep consoles anymore fancy bootsplash yeah that is doable in any distros then they login to X via gdm and don't touch console anymore.
Just sad for console lovers.

Well, we don’t like unanswered questions here. And this is a very specific/niche topic. I don’t think any of the active, regulars here would have any experience with this. So it’s unlikely that this particular question would have had any responses at all.

And contrary to your accusation, I actually spend most of my time in the terminal. Sometimes on machines without a GUI installed at all and I’ve never heard of this particular patch. But I’ve also had no interest in changing the background of the terminal.

All of my machines run Debian, installed via the minimal net install, which yields a minimal, terminal only environment. I have an old desktop and an old laptop running terminal only installs of Debian.

My main laptop also has lightdm, X11 and suckless dwm installed, plus all of the usual GUI apps one might need for day to day usage, Firefox, libre-office, Gimp etc.

I may not know the answer to the question. But I at least offered some advice on some other avenues of attack/other things to look into. It’s kinda what we do in this community. If we don’t know the answer to something, we’ll suggest alternative courses of action.

 

[JasKinasis]

Digging into this a bit further, it seems the maintainer of that GitHub repository was using a patch from Gentoo, originally aimed at v4.19 of the Kernel. And they simply applied the patch to later kernel versions, for their own use.

It worked for them, right up until v5.17 - at which point, it became extremely buggy.

Not knowing/understanding any of the technical details about the implementation of the patch, or the changes made in the 5.17 kernel that were causing the issues, they were unable to fix the bugs/problems, so it looks like they have abandoned the project altogether.

It looks like the developers of the original patch have been out of the picture for a long time too. So the person maintaining that GitHub repo was the only person keeping the project alive.

From a few searches online, nobody else seems to be talking about this patch. At least not in recent years. The only person with any recent interest in it is you. I’d say the project is dead in the water this point.

This is a prime example what happens when a project only has one maintainer.

I’m aware of a few framebuffer image viewers for the terminal. But they aren’t going to do quite what you’re looking to do.
And I’m not aware of any other projects doing anything similar to this.

You might just have to make do with a boring terminal. Personally, I prefer my terminal to have a plain background anyway!

 

[provision]

Yes I currently running 6.5.9 and going back to previous kernels on modern hardware is a big no no.

On Debian fb backgrounds were never there, they coming from Gentoo originally but if you used many distros in the past 20 years plenty of them like Suse, Redhat, Centos, Fedora etc had this:

Then it just disappeared similar to XGL, would be nice if somebody would pick this up and continue the development.