jwdunn

Trick Out Your Boot Process

For people like me who are extremely particular about how their computer looks and operates, the boot process is just itching to be tinkered with. There are plenty of free applications and nifty terminal commands which make minor changes to your Mac’s behavior during startup possible — and most of them aren’t purely aesthetic. Here’s a few ways to bring some X to the Z to your boot process.

Quiet the Startup Sound

Sometimes the Mac’s signature “bong” is obnoxious — nothing says “this is boring and I want to check my email” like letting one of these go during lecture. The solution: adjust the startups sound’s volume using Arcana Research’s free StartupSound.prefpane.

StartupSound.prefpane is Tiger, Leopard, PPC and Intel compatible and, although officially in beta, hasn’t given me any problems in two years of use.

Change the Boot Screen’s Logo

OS X’s first sign of life is its grey boot screen, which displays the Apple logo above a spinning progress indicator. For Mac users that don’t appreciate self-homage, there is BootXChanger, a wicked little utility that can replace the boot screen’s Apple logo with another image.

BootXChanger is compatible with Tiger and Leopard, and its .dmg includes several candidates for replacing the logo. There are a few restrictions for replacement images: they must use less than 100 colors, maintain the boot screen’s grey background (#BFBFBF), and generally be simple.

I chose the radioactivity symbol included with the application, because I feel it captures my dangerous lifestyle. Nothing says cool like a bad-ass boot screen.

Use a Custom Boot Menu

If you regularly change your boot disk or need to mess around in OS X’s startup environment, EFI, then the custom boot menu rEFIt is worth checking out. rEFIt interrupts the boot process to insert a menu which will allow you to select your boot disk or run a variety of commands and scripts. I used rEFIt for a spell when I was regularly switching between my OS X and Widows XP (Boot Camp) partitions.

rEFIt will also allow you to change the icon of any non-Mac partitions on your drive, an otherwise tedious process that involves working around filesystem incompatibilities. It is in active development and is compatible with all Intel Macs.

Require Authentication

This tip is quite elementary, but I couldn’t leave it out because of its importance to keeping your data safe. A surprising number of my friends have set their Macs to boot directly into OS X without asking for login information, which means their data is accessible to anyone who has access to their computer. Even if you require authentication to wake your computer from sleep or screen saving, neglecting to require authentication at login leaves you vulnerable because it’s always possible to hard reboot a computer and initiate the startup process. If that startup process leads directly into the OS, you’ve just left your back door unlocked.

To require password entry for accessing the OS during the boot process, open the Accounts preference pane in System Preferences. Click on the Login Options button towards the bottom left and be sure that “Disabled” appears to the right of “Automatic Login:”. If you don’t want to have to enter your username to log in, select “List of users” to the right of “Display login window as:”. When you’re done, your Login Options settings should look like this:

This is a very easy way to make your computer significantly more secure.

Change the Login Screen’s Background

If you’ve already followed the above tip and disabled automatic login, you’ll be spending some time in front of OS X’s login screen whenever you start up your Mac. Behind the centered login window you’ll see OS X’s signature desktop wallpaper — probably Tiger’s aqua blue or Leopard’s purple cosmos.

It’s possible to replace the login screen’s default background with your current desktop wallpaper (or any image you decide is more tasteful) with some simple unix commands. Pop open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and enter the following command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow \DesktopPicture '/path/to/replacement/image/file.jpg'

where /path/to/replacement/image/file.jpg is the location of the image that will henceforth appear behind the login window. Note that this path cannot include your home folder, so you’ll need to store the replacement image in a system folder somewhere.

Cheers to Dirk Thannhäuser for the command. If you’d like to know more about replacing the login screen’s background image, there are several useful comments on his hint.

Add a Message to the Login Window

Several free utilities allow modification of the text that appears below “Mac OS X” at the head of OS X’s login window. I recommend Onyx for its numerous other system tweaking and maintenance capabilities.

If you don’t want to involve a third-party application to brand your Mac’s login window with a short message, try using a text editor to modify /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist by adding the following block of code immediately below the first <dict> tag:

<key>LoginwindowText</key>
<string>Desired text</string>

Obviously, Desired text is the message you would like to appear on your login window. Beware: special characters may cause problems for your login process.

On my Macbook Pro, I set the login window text to my name, email, and phone number so that anyone can identify my computer without having to log in. On a public computer, the LoginwindowText string can relay login instructions or a Message of the Day.