sick of splashy not working? Try Plymouth!

[TheGreatSudoku]

One glaring omission in LMDE is the lack of a splash screen. I initially installed splashy and for months have done nothing but fight to get it to work, and even then it's still half-broken. After browsing the forums here, a poster mentioned "plymouth" in passing. all I gotta say is WOW. It actually works.. it's simple... it's not a headache like splashy. It actually does what it's supposed to do.. no questions asked!

nice wiki page here:
http://wiki.debian.org/plymouth

[vincent]

Splashy has long been deprecated and development has halted as far as I know, so there's no point in even trying to get it to work. Meanwhile, Plymouth only works nicely if you have a video driver that supports KMS. On the other hand, if you use either nvidia or fglrx (neither of which support KMS), you're going to get a very pixelated and/or low-resolution boot screen that's rather ugly. That's why no bootscreen was included by default in LMDE (or Debian proper, for that matter).

[TheGreatSudoku]

Intel i915 here, no issues whatsoever with plymouth. Is the splash-screen used in Ubuntu proprietary and un-portable to Debain? Really curious why main version of Mint have splash screens but LMDE does not.

[GeneC]

Nvidia Geoforce 210 card using Nvidia 195 drivers.

LMDE 64 bit

Plymouth installed (solar winds) seems to work fine, excellent resolution, so I guess its not a problem with all Nvidia.

[vincent]

Intel i915 here, no issues whatsoever with plymouth. Is the splash-screen used in Ubuntu proprietary and un-portable to Debain? Really curious why main version of Mint have splash screens but LMDE does not.

No, both Ubuntu and Debian have plymouth in their repositories. By default, Ubuntu comes with plymouth installed and working out-of-the-box; Debian does not.

http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_debian.php

No boot splash
Plymouth wasn't considered stable enough to be included in LMDE. Alternatives such as usplash or splashy seemed obsolete and rather than using them temporarily, it was decided not to use any default boot splash.

If Plymouth works for you, great.

[ScoobyDan]

I have a GeForce 7025 card, running nVidia 195 drivers on LMDE 64bit. I could only get Plymouth working by following these instructions:

1) sudo apt-get install plymouth plymouth-themes-all v86d

2) gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub
Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="..."
with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1024x768,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
Replace #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
with GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768

3) gksudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
Add a line containing: uvesafb mode_option=1024x768 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap

4) echo FRAMEBUFFER=y | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash

5) sudo update-grub2

6) sudo update-initramfs -u

If I followed the instructions on the Debian wiki (linked above), without following the above steps, all I could get is the basic text effect (a blue progress bar).

I hope this helps someone...

Daniel

[TheGreatSudoku]

More to the point, I was asking WHAT splash package is used in Mint main. And furthermore why whatever splash package that may be that is used in Mint main is not included/enabled in LMDE. I was wondering if the package was THAT Ubuntu specific that it wouldn't work in Debian, or if the Mint splash could be ported and just wasn't for the sake of time, etc.

[vincent]

More to the point, I was asking WHAT splash package is used in Mint main. And furthermore why whatever splash package that may be that is used in Mint main is not included/enabled in LMDE. I was wondering if the package was THAT Ubuntu specific that it wouldn't work in Debian, or if the Mint splash could be ported and just wasn't for the sake of time, etc.

Plymouth is also used in Ubuntu/Mint "main". Ubuntu comes with Plymouth setup out of the box (and therefore Mint main does as well); Debian does not (and therefore LMDE doesn't). You may suggest that Plymouth be enabled out-of-the-box on LMDE, but the Mint devs have clearly stated their intention NOT to use a boot splash for LMDE at the present. (http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_debian.php)

For the record, I believe that this is a good decision, because 1) it's good practice not to diverge needlessly from upstream, and 2) Plymouth does not work for everybody at the moment.

ScoobyDan, the instructions you posted are simply a workaround to the issue at hand. What you are doing is simply using a vesa framebuffer to load Plymouth at boot; this does not address Plymouth's lack of support for drivers which do not support KMS (again, fglrx and nvidia).