Spreading Beefy Miracle love

Many long-time Fedora contributors and users have fond memories of Beefy Miracle, the Fedora 17 code name, and its mascot. Major Haydn has a great writeup about it, with instructions on switching back to its Plymouth boot splash on your Fedora machine.

But… why limit one’s chance at “accepting the truth and beauty” (sic) to Fedora users (or, strictly speaking, to one’s Fedora machines)? This simply would not do. This sort of fun does not deserved to be contained.

                               .-=-. __
                    ,         /     \   \    ||||
                   \\\\      |O___O |    | \\||||
                   \   //    | \_/  |    |  \   /
                    '-=/----/|     /     |   |-'
                           // //  /     -----'
                          //  \\ /      /
                         //  // /      /
                        //  \\ /      /
                       //  // /      /
                      /|   ' /      /
                      //\___/      /
                     //   ||\     /
                     \\_  || '-=-'
                     /' /  \\_.-
                    /  /    -=| |
                    '-'      |  |
                              '-'

                         -----------------------

CONGRATULATIONS, MEAT-BASED LIFE FORM! YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE TRUTH AND
BEAUTY OF THE GLORIOUS HAPPY HOT-DOG INTO YOUR LIFE AND COMPUTING-BOX.

YOUR COMPUTING-MACHINE SHOULD NOW BE AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED TO ENJOY
BEEFY STARTUP EXPERIENCE WITH PIQUANT MUSTARD INDICATING PROGRESS!

I’ve been meaning to do a release for other distributions on April 1. Because… why not, right?

Time flies, and suddenly it was March 31st already yesterday, and after a dentist visit that made me realize I would have to spend even more $$$ out of pocket, I figured I need some comic relief. And finally stopped procrastinated and started… uh, evangelizing?

Turns out it’s more … fun than expected. The path to “plenty of giggles and lots of consternation” (per Major) is full of consternation indeed!

• the home page does not host the latest tarball, the one actually used in Fedora
• there is also no git repo
• so I ended up recreating a git repo, based on the released tarballs from the home page plus using fedpkg srpm to retrieve the last tarball from the Fedora lookaside cache
• Licensing archeology - we need to chase the authors to find the intended license, as the text was not checked in - it’s CC-BY-SA but which one?
• Ubuntu does not ship plymouth-set-default-theme so I finally had to learn how to set up alternatives
• Debian and Ubuntu packaged Plymouth themes differently

But after this baptism by fire (or mustard?) - anyway, a self inflicted one as I could have started this earlier - all the kinks are worked out.

The screenshots are shown on a VM (which runs Debian arm64 on my Mac) - since that’s easier to capture - but I have this running on AlmaLinux Kitten, as well as Debian and Ubuntu on bare metal. Incidentally the last issue found, that I forgot to build this for Architecture: all was discovered trying to take the screenshot when the amd64 build won’t install :P

Install and enjoy!

• Debian Mentors for Debian - hopefully this gets sponsored and submitted this week
• COPR for Enterprise Linux distributions
• PPA for Ubuntu

This post is day 28 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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