How can I display a static image while Debian Linux is booting up?

Question

I need to show a static image with the logo of our department while Debian boots. Is there any easy way or tool to do this? (Any parameter of the kernel maybe?) It doesn't have to be anything fancy (like a progress bar)... just a plain an simple image.

I've seen many bootsplash projects..but most of them are broken. I tried splashy (which is available on the repo), but by the time it loads, my system is already booted, so I don't really like it.

Oh..note that I don't have any Xorg server installed.

Answer 1

I recently was trying to hack together a working boot splash in this post on Unix & Linux.

I found that fbsplash works, but has some issues. The process of creating a splash screen and using it aren't very user-friendly. The system is lightweight and very customizable, though. And best of all, it doesn't use X–doesn't even link to any X libraries.

I also wrote this patch to fix some of the issues I personally had with it, namely some string insecurity in the shell scripts, the inability to link non-statically, and a cache dir residing in /usr/lib (patch changes it to the more traditional /var/run/splash).