ventoy-squid-girl

Squid girl GRUB2 theme for Ventoy.

• Multiple resolution support (1366x768, 1920x1080, 2048x1080 ultrawide, 3840x2160 4K)
• Scrollbar
• Anime squid

Setup:

1. Initialize a Ventoy multiboot drive. https://github.com/ventoy/ventoy/releases/latest
2. Copy the ventoy/ folder into the root of your ventoy USB.
3. Create an iso/ directory in the root of your ventoy USB
   • Alternatively, change VTOY_DEFAULT_SEARCH_ROOT to "/" in ventoy.json.

For theming, name your images in a way that Ventoy can understand according to the keys in ventoy.json. For example, MacOS.iso would be given an icon, but Macos.iso would not.

TODO:

• Make controls description more comprehensive
  • Currently, only GRUB2-specific controls are shown (Enter,E,C)
  • Iconographic guides for the F1 to F5 keys should also be added

---

behind the scenes

How did I make this?

• Docs
  • Ventoy docs
    • resolution_fit = 1 and default_file = 0 will pattern-match the current monitor resolution when selecting theme.txt. For example, for 1920x1080:
      • ventoy/theme/1920x1080/theme.txt would be matched
      • ventoy/theme/theme-1920x1080.txt would be matched
  • Some Russian grub2 docs [1] [2]
• I studied this pull request that adopted a GRUB2 theme into Ventoy.
  • Instead of an item box, I added a transparent GIMP-made box directly in the background.
  • If there is some sort of alloc error/magic error on usb boot, inspect ventoy.json. Ventoy's code fully trusts ventoy.json, so wrong data in the json will mess things up.
• I looked at the Ventoy docs for Ventoy-specific functions.
• I used the following QEMU command for some testing, straight from the drive. However, QEMU sometimes didn't update the theme or didn't render the fonts.

  $ sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -boot order=d -drive file=/dev/sdb,format=raw
  -vga virtio # change /dev/sdb as needed

• I tested resolutions on any monitors I had access to.
  • Some fonts acted peculiar. For example, in 1366x768, the font was too large (inconveniently cutting off text) if I set DejaVu's font size to 14. However, if I increased font size to 32 instead of 14, the font size was correctly proportionate.
• I used Upscayl to increase the background sharpness for 4K HiDPI monitors, then I cropped that new image for 2048x1080 ultrawide.
• I used this as reference to fix an issue with my custom scrollbar not appearing.
  • The scrollbar didn't render until I used a menu pixmap. For design purposes, the pixmap parts are fully transparent PNGs.