HowTo: nice custom splash screen for your GRUB boot menu

Ever wondered if there's a way to change your GRUB bootmanager startup screen to something more appealing than those white and black ASCII lines? There is!!
Here's a complete walk-through description of the necessary steps (tested with Ubuntu linux 8.04):
First you need to edit your "/boot/grub/menu.lst" by opening a console window and typing

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

then adding the line

splashimage=(hd0,6)/boot/grub/splashimages/grub-grey2.xpm.gz

somewhere at the beginning.

* (hd0,6) is the partition where your splash screen will be located, change to fit your needs! (grub has a strange enumberation scheme for partitions; its important you look at the file "menu.lst" for details on the data assigned to your ubuntu partition, SIMPLY locate the entry that says "Ubuntu 8.04" or whichever you have, right below it should read "root (hdX,Y)". Use this name for "splashimage=..")
* /boot/grub/splashimages/ is the folder where your splash images are located
* grub-grey2.xpm.gz is the file name of your splash image.

The splash image needs to be stored in a special way: you need to adjust the color depth to 14(!) colors (with gimp goto image->mode->indexed choose "generate optimum palette" and enter "14", then select an appropriate dithering algorithm which looks good on your picture) and change the resolution to 640x480, then save as xpm.
Now you just need to compress your splash image and copy it to the appropriate folder by typing

gzip filename-of-your-splashimage.xpm
sudo cp filename-of-your-splashimage.xpm.gz /boot/grub/splashimages

and voilà, the next boot will show up with a nice new look.

Here is the splash image I created for my grub (feel free to use it too if you like it,
just save as 14 color xpm with GIMP and compress like described above):