In the process there were quite a few things that changed which I either didn't like, or utterly despised. Though that didn't stop me and I started making thing's "just right".
One of these were to customize my grub splash screen. Since the eye-pleasing grub screens have become popular a few years ago, having to go back to and 80x25 black/white screen was quite disappointing, so I got onto the net on the lookout for a wallpaper I could use I my splash screen, since those that ship with the grub2-splashimages packages are horrible.
I found some truly great Ubuntu wallpapers at http://www.desktopnexus.com/tag/ubuntu/1, and found a suitable one.
Though in the process I discovered the limitations of grub "themes". You're stuck with a choice of 16 colors and the frame and text/title/list positions/sizes are fixed. So I jumped into the grub source, modified it, rebuilt the package and installed it - made simple thanks to Debian's amazing package management system.
I basically changed the title to show my system's hostname instead of the grub version, move it to the middle on the Y axis (instead of 3-4 columns off-center), move the whole bunch a bit downwards to fit in with the background, changed the column widths a bit to also better fit the background, and finally tuned the colors just a bit.
At one point I actually got a nice fading "highlight" going, though the nature of the background made this look nice for one option and awkward for others. So I stuck with an opaque highlight.
To finish it off I customized the grub.cfg generation scripts and their configuration a bit, so grub and the kernel is "just right"... for the moment at least.
The result is the following. Since it requires quite a bit of patching on the C source code, I'm going to skip explaining how I did it. If you want the patch, send me a message and I'll share it with you together with some explanations of the changes.
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