Plymouth In Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2: Dead Simple

A month ago we wrote about Plymouth getting pulled into Ubuntu 10.04 LTS after Canonical ended up flip-flopping on their decision to use this Red Hat created splash program that leverages kernel mode-setting to provide a pleasant and flicker-free boot experience while being highly customizable and extensible. After the Plymouth packages got pulled into Ubuntu 10.04 LTS we also provided a video that showed it running on the "Lucid Lynx", but it was pretty boring with just a static Ubuntu logo and at the time some warning messages bled into the background.

Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 is scheduled to be released today and it will feature Plymouth instead of USplash. The udev warning messages have since been cleared up, but the artwork remains the same. The entire Plymouth splash plug-in for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 is just an Ubuntu logo that sits there. No fading, no progress bar, nothing. At least the logo is now being shown at the screen's native resolution and if hitting the ESC key you get to see the boot messages also at a nice resolution thanks to KMS.

Right now Ubuntu 10.04 is using a Plymouth 0.8 snapshot and we have successfully tested the latest Lucid packages using Intel and ATI kernel mode-setting. Below is a photograph of this Plymouth plug-in as of today's Ubuntu Lucid packages, which will hopefully be enhanced by the artwork team before Ubuntu 10.04 LTS final is released in April. Using Red Hat's Plymouth besides Ubuntu and Fedora is also Mandriva since their 2010.0 release.