Plymouth

Plymouth is a project from Fedora providing a flicker-free graphical boot process. It relies on kernel mode setting (KMS) to set the native resolution of the display as early as possible, then provides an eye-candy splash screen leading all the way up to the login manager.

Preparation

Warning: Plymouth is currently under heavy development and may contain bugs.

Plymouth primarily uses KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) to display graphics. If you can't use KMS (e.g. because you are using a proprietary driver) you will need to use framebuffer instead. Uvesafb is recommended as it can function with widescreen resolutions.

If you have neither KMS nor a framebuffer, Plymouth will fall back to text-mode.

Installation

Plymouth is not presently available in the Official Repositories, and will need to be installed from the AUR.

The stable one is called plymouth and the git version plymouth-git.

Configuration

Including Plymouth in the Initcpio

Add Plymouth to the HOOKS array in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. It must be added after base and udev for it to work:

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

HOOKS="base udev plymouth [...] "

Warning: If you use hard drive encryption with the encrypt hook, you must replace the encrypt hook with plymouth-encrypt in order to get to the TTY password prompts.

For early KMS start add the module radeon (for radeon cards), i915 (for intel cards) or nouveau (for nvidia cards) to the MODULES line in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

MODULES="i915"
or
MODULES="radeon"
or
MODULES="nouveau"

Rebuild your initrd image (refer to the mkinitcpio article for more info):

# mkinitcpio -p [name of your kernel preset]

The kernel command line

You now need to set quiet splash as you kernel command line parameters in your bootloader. See Kernel parameters for more info.

Changing the Theme

Plymouth comes with a selection of themes:

1. Fade-in: "Simple theme that fades in and out with shimmering stars"
2. Glow: "Corporate theme with pie chart boot progress followed by a glowing emerging logo"
3. Script: "Script example plugin" (Despite the description seems to be a quite nice Arch logo theme)
4. Solar: "Space theme with violent flaring blue star"
5. Spinner: "Simple theme with a loading spinner"
6. Spinfinity: "Simple theme that shows a rotating infinity sign in the center of the screen"
7. (Text: "Text mode theme with tricolor progress bar")
8. (Details: "Verbose fallback theme")

By default, no theme is selected, you must select a theme by editing /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf

Example:

[Daemon]
Theme=spinner

All currently installed themes can be listed by using this:

$ ls /usr/share/plymouth/themes
details  glow    solar       spinner  tribar
fade-in  script  spinfinity  text

Themes can be Previewed without Rebuilding, hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to change to console, log in as root and type:

# plymouthd
# plymouth --show-splash

To quit the preview hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 again and type:

# plymouth --quit

every time a theme is changed, the kernel image must be rebuilt with:

# mkinitcpio -p <name of your kernel preset; e.g. linux>

Reboot to apply the changes.

See also

Original Spec

A related forum thread