# 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. In EFI/UEFI systems, plymouth can utilize the EFI framebuffer, otherwise 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 package is plymouth and the development version is plymouth-git.

### The plymouth hook

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 (if you are using the open drivers) 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"

### The kernel command line

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

Rebuild your initrd image (see mkinitcpio article for details), for example:

    # mkinitcpio -p linux

## Configuration

### Smooth transition

For smooth transition to Display Manager you have to:

1. See the Wiki Page (link in 5) to prepare your Display Manager
2. Disable your Display Manager Unit, e.g. `systemctl disable kdm.service`
3. Enable the respective DM-plymouth Unit (GDM, KDM, LXDM, SLiM units provided), e.g. `systemctl enable kdm-plymouth.service`

### Show Delay

As of version 0.9.0 plymouth has a new configuration option available in /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf

    /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf

    [Daemon]
    Theme=spinner
    ShowDelay=5

On systems that boot quickly, you may only see a flicker of your splash theme before your DM or login prompt is ready. You can set ShowDelay to an interval (in seconds) longer than your boot time to prevent this flicker and only show a blank screen. The default is 5 seconds, but you may wish to change this to a lower value to see your splash earlier during boot.

### 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, spinner theme is selected. You can change the theme by editing `/etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf`, for example:

    /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf

    [Daemon]
    Theme=spinner
    ShowDelay=5

You will also need to rebuild your initrd image every time you change your theme.

All currently installed themes can be listed by using this command:

    $ plymouth-set-default-theme -l

or:

    $ ls /usr/share/plymouth/themes

    details  glow    solar       spinner  tribar
    fade-in  script  spinfinity  text

Themes can be previewed without rebuilding, press `Ctrl+Alt+F2` to change to console, log in as root and type:

    # plymouthd
    # plymouth --show-splash

To quit the preview, press `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>

To change theme and rebuild initrd image:

    # plymouth-set-default-theme -R <theme>

Reboot to apply the changes.

## See also

- Original Spec
- Related forum thread

Category:

- Bootsplash