A mkinitcpio hook that draws out the word "Welcome" in big letters early during the boot process and accepts input for disk decryption. A box is drawn underneath for inputting the password and printing the output of the 'fsck' hook.

The hook wraps and replaces the encrypt hook so that it can have greater control over the cursor and any printed messages.

If you find that the message is squeezed into a smaller number of columns that can fit on screen, you may need to enable early `kernel mode setting`_, although I found enabling the consolefont hook also fixed the issue.

It works very well with Evan Purkhiser's mkinitcpio-colors.

0. Ensure that you can successfully use the encrypt hook without first.
1. Copy hooks/welcome into /etc/initcpio/hooks.
2. Copy install/welcome into /etc/initcpio/install.
3. Add the welcome hook to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf replacing the encrypt hook.
4. Optionally configure the colours to use in /etc/vconsole.conf:

WELCOME_BG=0    # background
WELCOME_FG=5    # foreground ("Welcome")
WELCOME_IN=6    # input box frame

where the number is 0-15 corresponding to the 16 defined console colours.

5. Rebuild the initramfs image with mkinitcpio.

Email me @ [email protected] for questions or contributions.