Problems with plymouth (including documentation)

Thank you for taking the time toreport this bug and help to improve Ubuntu.

plymouth is not a splash screen, it's an I/O multiplexer which supports multiple outputs - including graphical splash. It is an essential component of the boot process in Lucid regardless of whether the boot splash is of interest, and cannot be disabled.

The bug here is with slim integration with plymouth. The slim package needs to be converted to use an upstart job instead of an init script, as gdm, kdm, xdm, and lxdm all have been, so that plymouth can be told to stop when slim is starting. As long as slim uses a sysvinit script instead of an upstart job, this is not possible.

As I wrote, I know why plymouth is not stopping when I am using slim, so this is not issue.

The problem is, that documentation leads to misunderstand - informations providen there don't work, simply as that.

You mentioned also, that "plymouth is not splash screen, it,s an I/O multiplexer".

So, there is another problem in package description:

apt-cache show plymouth

Description: graphical boot animation and logger - main package
 Plymouth is an application that runs very early in the boot process
 (even before the root filesystem is mounted!) that provides a graphical
 boot animation while the boot process happens in the background.

After reading this description - I was more than sure that it's just "another splash screen" which hides important information from boot process... How can I read what plymouth is?

bluszcz@atomic [(wto kwi 20) 11:06]:~
$ ls /usr/share/doc/plymouth/
changelog.Debian.gz changelog.gz copyright README.Debian
bluszcz@atomic [(wto kwi 20) 11:06]:~

The only README is Debian specific and doesn't provide information what plymouth is. And due to your reply - apt-cache show plymouth provide informations which are not correct.

However, I managed not to run plymouth using stupid hack/trick - my Ubuntu Lucid boots faster now. I am most than sure that I don't need it. As Ubuntu user I want to have possibility to remove package which is not necessary.

But let's come back to package again - descriptions and docs must be fixed.

BTW, I have just checked Dependencies of plymouth, and it's depend on libdrm-radeon1 for example...

I cannot remove libdrm-radeon1 because of plymouth, which is absurd. I don't have ATI card (Intel here), and DRM is now part of base system? :O Should I submit another bug for this libdrm-radeon1?

I took a look at:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth

and even there I cannot find any informations about "advantages of Plymouth". The only nice thing (which I found there) is logging of boot process.

But I read there "For systems that don't have DRM mode settings drivers, plymouth falls back to text mode.".

What does it means? "text" mode is simply theme with text mode (default one I think) or it's real text mode which doesn't prevents X from start? I am asking because I don't understand why and how X cannot start because of plymouth. Maybe without using DRM plymouth can be less problematic?

Where I can read about "I/O multiplexer" functionality?

Another thing about documentation and /etc/default/grub file:

root@atomic:~# ls /etc/default/grub
ls: cannot access /etc/default/grub: No such file or directory
root@atomic:~#

Fresh update (made 5 minutes ago).

Every time when you fix/update/create/install/deleting or something else with plymouth's splash YOU MUST EXEC:
sudo /usr/sbin/update-initramfs -u