BRAND.4TH(8)

✨ BRAND.4TH(8) — the FreeBSD ASCII art boot module, bestie edition ✨

Okay so picture this: brand.4th — a whole little file whose entire personality is drawing the ASCII art BSD brand up above the boot loader menu. That's it. That's the job. 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

brand.4th — the FreeBSD ASCII art boot module, aka the thing that makes your boot menu look cute before your computer even wakes up properly.

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So brand.4th is a set of commands designed to draw the ASCII art BSD brand above the boot loader menu. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

But real talk — the commands in brand.4th by themselves are not enough for most uses. Like, they're a vibe, not a whole personality. Please refer to the examples below for the most common situations, and to loader(8) for additional commands.

💖 Before using any of the commands provided in brand.4th, it must be included through the command:

include brand.4th

Good news though: this line is already present in the default /boot/menu.rc file, so it is not needed (and should not be re-issued) in a normal setup. Don't be that person. 🙈

🦋 The commands it hands you

• draw-brand — Draws the BSD brand. That's the whole assignment and it ate. 🔥

The brand that gets drawn is configured by setting the loader_brand variable in loader.conf(5) to one of fbsd (the default, obvs) or none.

The position of the logo can be configured by setting the loader_brand_x and loader_brand_y variables in loader.conf(5). The default values are 2 (x) and 1 (y). Slay coordinates. ✨

🧚 The environment variables that affect its behavior

• loader_brand — Selects the desired brand in the beastie boot menu. Possible values are: fbsd (default) or none. Choose your fighter. 👑
• loader_brand_x — Sets the desired column position of the brand. Default is 2.
• loader_brand_y — Sets the desired row position of the brand. Default is 1.

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💜 FILES 💜

• /boot/loader — The loader(8). The main character, lowkey.
• /boot/brand.4th — brand.4th itself. She's right there in the title, bestie.
• /boot/loader.rc — The loader(8) bootstrapping script. The stage crew behind the scenes. 🫶

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Set the FreeBSD brand in loader.conf(5) — literally just:

loader_brand="fbsd"

And boom, brand drawn. No cap. 💀

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

loader.conf(5), loader(8) — go read them, they're giving useful. 📚

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🍓 HISTORY 🍓

The brand.4th set of commands first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0. An elder icon, fr fr. 👑

🌸 AUTHORS 🌸

The brand.4th set of commands was written by Devin Teske <dteske@FreeBSD.org>. Thank you for the art, king. 💖

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🎀 And that's the tea, bestie: this page dropped on the Debian side of things with a May 18, 2011 date on it — so go forth and draw your brand, mwah 💋✨