[ubuntu-in] Editing grub "menu.lst"

[ramnarayan.k at gmail.com]

Hi

have been trying to edit the menu.lst to be a bit attractive and catchy

and have been following the ubuntu grubhowto

mainly have been trying to enable the "pretty colours" and adding a
"splash image"

so i added / edited the following lines in the menu.lst
# Pretty colours
#color cyan/blue white/blue
prettycolours white/blue

for pretty colours i tried lots of options
just adding
white/blue
cyan/blue

and finally
prettycolours white/blue

On rebooting there was no change the default menu.lst showed up

then i tried adding a splash image

made my own - 3 colours and 640 x480 pixels in the xpm format then made
into an xpm.gz file
then added the following line

## splash image
splashimage (hd0,5)/boot/grub/splash3.xpm.gz

*Now* there was change in the grub boot loader - but not as expected the
new background was just a streak of pixelated colours and i could now
*not" see the result of moving the select options.

Then i tried the image option i downloaded a link to gnu-head.xpm.gz 
file mentioned in the ubuntu grubhowto , this works and the grub loader 
looks much better , then checked how many colors -it seems to me to be 
two black and white with variations of gray , hence this last query on 
colours,


***
So a few questions
1. Why is the pretty colours option not working - it has worked before
in previous Ubuntu Installations

2. Are the two options Pretty Colours and Splash Image options mutually
incompatible

3. what could be wrong with a customized image i am trying to put on.

4. when one says 16 colours are acceptable what does this mean

***
any suggestions and tips

thanks
ram