I’ll start with some background information. I recently decided to try out Garuda’s Mokka flavor, so I installed it on my primary laptop computer. In the process, because I had to partition my root and home partitions, their names and labels were erased. This wasn’t an issue for me because I used the Garuda default boot manager, Grub2, but I’ve grown tired of dealing with navigating the OS menu list to choose which OS I boot, so I decided to install and configure the rEFInd boot manager. The installation came off without a hitch, but when I rebooted to check my customization’s. everything looked as I expected, except that the icon image to choose my Garuda installation being displayed was the default tux image, not my custom Garuda-G image.
I began my research with too many Internet searches that returned no successful resolutions. Next, I loaded the Using rEFInd webpage to see if it had any useful information. It linked me to The rEFInd Boot Manager: Configuring the Boot Manager page, which in turn led me to the Setting OS Icons page, which provides seven ways to auto-detect boot loaders, depending on how it’s implemented. I tried all seven methods to no avail, but I misunderstood the one that held the solution I was seeking:
You can give the GPT partition from which the boot loader is loaded a name that matches the OS name component of the icon filename. This works much like the previous method, except that you'd use a tool like gdisk or parted to set the partition's name, rather than tune2fs or GParted to set the filesystem's name. Note that rEFInd ignores some common default partition names (namely Microsoft basic data, Linux filesystem, and Apple HFS/HFS+) when implementing this rule, since other rules are likely to produce more accurate results.
The first time I read this option, I incorrectly assumed it was referring to the EFI partition, so I changed it’s label. After re-reading all of the seven options, it finally occurred to me that the option I’ve listed above was referring to my root (/) partition (where my /boot partition resides storing the boot loader, so I used gparted to check, and I saw that both my Garuda root and home partitions had no names or labels set, so I named the root partition ‘garuda’ and my home partition ‘Garuda/home’.
This simple change solved my issue, and now when I restart my laptop PC, I get the rEFInd boot screen with my custom Garuda-G image (named garuda.png) displayed for my Garuda installation!
This adventure has humbled me, and now I feel foolish now that I understand what the issue and solution are, and I realize that I could have avoided all this if only I had paid attention to the fact that I know that Calamares-type installers often erase partition names when the partition is being formatted and the label isn’t entered or changed in the appropriate text entry field.
Ernie
, that’s why I’m a bit sheepish about the whole thing. I knew that, but it didn’t occur to me, until I’d already tried everything at least once, then when I re-read the option that had my solution for me, I realized I had miss-understood what it was telling me, confounding the issue for me! That’s why I feel so foolish, even though I know it’s not the end of the world for me either!