Howto: Plymouth in Debian Squeeze

[stevepusser]

In part because of this thread, and because an upcoming Debian Squeeze derived distro had no boot splash, we had a crash course in plymouth themes. It turns out that one can have a script file in the theme that can do all sort of magic, including determining the screen resolution and resizing a background image to fit. I admit we reused part of a script that was already out there on the net for Mint (mintdoes7)...but plymouth theming can be just as fun and involving as conky tuning, and I'm trying not to get sucked in....basically the theme has a progress bar, a message, and a background that the script resizes. The script is in the sources here:

ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.m ... s-mepis11/

[regular]

Many great thanks! This got Plymouth to work on my system

[stevepusser]

I have noticed that the Debian and Ubuntu distros seem to ignore the "shutdown" and "suspend-resume" sections in the scripts. However, if you change the plymouth theme without updating the initrd file, then you can have one then run at boot from the initrd and different one run at shutdown. I have an Earth-sunrise and Earth-sunset theme doing just that.

[geazzy]

nice tutorial

[EddieB]

Thanks a million Mr. James ... This is great ...

As an aside ... I had to make a few tweaks to the kernel boot options to get things running smoothly as dmesg was throwing mtrr errors ...

After checking out the uvesafb docs I modified my mtrr boot params to 2 - write-back ... And everything's running great now ...

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:1024x768-24,mtrr:2,ywrap"

For some reason a grub background wouldn't show up with a GRUB_GFXMODE option for me ... but it works fine without it ...

Thanks for the info chief ... The solar theme is too cool ...

[maxibuntu]

.

[Stian1979]

I attempted to get plymouth to work by flowing the debian wiki and ended up by a flickering screen.
Attempted this one and a strange behavior occur. The boot splash come up, but disapare again and just show parts of the boot proces spread across the screen, but the splash coe back again if I push space and disapare when i push space again and the progress is slow and seams the computer will newer finish booting until i push a letter on the keyboard and then it jumps directly to the login with no or little delay, but are in the verbose mode for a sec or two before getting to kdm.

[caulfield]

I'd like to thank you for this howto! Now i have a perfect rocked leaving planet earth for Debian galaxy every time i boot my computer!

[jackdaws]

....if you change the plymouth theme without updating the initrd file, then you can have one then run at boot from the initrd and different one run at shutdown. I have an Earth-sunrise and Earth-sunset theme doing just that.

What a good point! I've already set up my plymouth theme with the new "joy" wheezy theme, and I'm happy with that, but maybe some clever person will think of a way to adapt it before the stable release...

[stevepusser]

Clever people over at Crunchbang have discovered how to have the boot messages displayed in Plymouth.

!. The theme must provide for boot messages. One that does is the Steampunk theme: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=146030

2. /lib/lsb/init-functions must be edited. Back it up first, and be able to boot from a Live disk or USB, or separate distro, in case
it needs to be restored. Here's a version already edited for you: http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/1051

Edit: if you create a new file instead of editing the existing one, make sure you make it executable (chmod -x). Also no changes will be visible until the initramfs has updated for your boot kernel (for those with multiple kernels, it's

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update-initramfs -k "all" -u

to update them all in one go.)

[jackdaws]

Very nice. The init-functions file works with the other themes as well, but with "joy" unfortunately each message is displayed on a single line one after another in quick succession. It might have been a useful alternative to have the whole list displayed in the background (as in the normal boot, but with the theme in the foreground). I reckon that to someone with the required language skill it would be a synch to set up, but it's beyond me. All the same, kudos to those at crunchbang for the very clever idea, and to Siarhei Kuchynski for the cool plymouth theme.

[stevepusser]

It works as you describe with the statler crunchbang theme & the Steampunk, so the joy theme's script just needs a bit of modification to enable the scrolling. I'll see if I can add it to the earth-sunrise theme, usually it's just cutting and pasting a section into the script.

Where I found the trick: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic ... ar/page/2/

[Schoelje]

@maxibuntu
I'm trying to build a Debian Based Live CD with KDE Desktop.
For days I've been trying many, many different ways to get Plymouth working. Live it never worked (only the default text mode) but after installing most of these solution seemed to function.
Your solution however, works Live and installed, so thank you very much!