I’ve used Ubuntu for the past few years, and I’ve watched it become more and more bloated, to the point that it was almost unusable on my work PC (P4, 2GB RAM). So I took a friend’s advice and installed Debian Squeeze, and oh boy, what a difference it has been! More snappy, and half the RAM. Anyway, since then I’ve been adding stuff to my installation, and Plymouth was one of them. Here are the instructions to get it installed just in case someone actually uses Debian:
0. Install v86d package.
1. /etc/default/grub
Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="..."
by GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
Replace #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
by GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024
Notice that grub2 supports different resolutions so you can put there a list
and grub2 will choose the first working one. (debian-edu grub background
image should be updated)
2. /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
Add a line containing: uvesafb mode_option=1280x1024-24 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap
3. echo FRAMEBUFFER=y | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash
4. sudo update-grub2
sudo update-initramfs -u
Now you have the default setted theme.
sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme --list (list available themes)
sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme THEME (change theme)
sudo update-initramfs -u (apply to initramfs)
For people –like me– who are saying ‘what the h* is Plymouth’.
Plymouth.
Its is what gives the lovely boot animation in ubuntu and some other disrtos.
It is also problematic and basically ‘bloat’ that the author was trying to get away from.. go figure.
I am busy setting up a Ubuntu server with plymouth. Funnily enough I cant find detail on how to configure Ubuntu with as little as possible packages. We are a staunch Debian company that started using Ubuntu for video related work. It seems we should move back to Debian because, as you mentioned, it is quite bloated.
Thanks for the howto, saved me some time.
Riaan Labuschagne
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Can’t say I agree with the comment that Plymouth is either problematic, or bloat. It’s just an animation, it just works, and it doesn’t drag down system resources, aka not bloat (at least my definition of it).
As for the Opera incompatibilities, I’ll look into it 🙂