Miscalleneous information

Background images

Choose-OS allows you to have your own ansi art (or any text) as background in the bootup menu.
The file to be used as background is defined with the background=type: filename directive. Type is either 'ascii', 'cp437' or 'dump'. Ascii is for normal latin1 text file. Pc437 is for text file that uses codepage 437. Dump is for binary screendump files. The file doesn't have to be 80x25. Screendump files are in the format as they're in video memory: character first, then the attribute.

There are plenty of programs for creating ansi graphics. Most of them are for DOS :(. I used SHMANSi to make the sample files. For Linux there are a few ansi paint programs but the DOS ones are still better.

Sample configurations

There are some sample configurations in the <CHOSPATH>/samples directory. Here's a short description of all the sample files.

You can view the .bin background files with utils/showscreen.
.asc files can simply be viewed with 'cat' (some of them might need codepage 437 be set, though (Type echo -e '\033(K' to set it and echo -e '\033(B' to switch back to Latin1).

Name/Screenshot Files Description
Traditional

chos.conf.example This creates a traditional (version 0.41 and earlier) looking configuration with no extra background image and stuff.
dump #1

chos.conf.dump
chos.bin
Uses a background image which with fat letters says 'Choose-OS'.
dump #2

chos08.conf
chos08.bin
Another one which uses a background image. Weird looking. (Hmm... It's actually modified shamansi exit screen... I hope no one minds)
ascii #1

chos.conf.ascii
chos.asc
  or
be.asc
Configuration that uses plain a ascii text file as background.
penguin

penguin.conf
penguin.bin
Configuration with Linux penguin logo

Recompiling

You might need to recompile Choose-OS if you need some feature that is not compiled in by default (for safety) or if you're still using an old 1.x kernel.
To do this,