Is there a way to disable or change the very first boot splash image, the blue "NOKIA" text on the white background that shows up as soon as you turn on the tablet? I tried flashing a custom initfs that had nothing but a linuxrc script that echoed "Testing 123", but I still got the Nokia logo. Is that somehow hard coded into the boot loader? I'm using a 770, btw.

See this thread should be what your looking for

Right, but the boot splash image in that thread is for way after you turn on the device once the rootfs has been mounted and the init scripts are running. I'm talking about the Nokia logo you see as soon as you turn the device on.

It seems like there are four "boot splashes" loaded sequentially:

1) As soon as you turn on the device, the blue NOKIA
2) In linuxrc for initfs, once you enter user state, the script runs the mysterious command /usr/bin/show_image -i /usr/share/images/logo-nokia -n. Disabling this doesn't affect the first blue NOKIA. I don't know what format logo-nokia is in, but GIMP doesn't recognize it ;-) If anyone has information on the show_image command and the switches it takes I'd greatly appreciate it.
3) Once init starts, /etc/init.d/fb-progress.sh runs as part of runlevel 2, which in turn runs fb-progress -l /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/qgn_indi_startup_nokia_logo.png -g /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/qgn_indi_progressbar.png 16. That's what the tutorial above refers to. Again, if anyone has information on fb-progress I'd appreciate it.
4) Finally, at some point, I don't know when, the tablet loads the "Nokia hands" image, which is another file in /us/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon.

Note that in the initfs stage, if you're entering the "actdead" stage, i.e. if you turn your tablet on with the power plugged in, it loads a different splash screen using /usr/bin/fb-chaimage -l /usr/share/image/qgn_indi_charger_connection_detected -c -p ffffff -s 27. Does anyone have any information on that one?

Hi earksiinni,
did you found how to do this?
I trying to debug some boot problems and can't find hot to disable splash and redirect dmesg to monitor.