Over in the audio/video forum a question about ATI vs. nVidia branched into a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of Plymouth. I expressed my preference for the satisfaction of scrolling boot text and offered a suggestion for restoring that. Then I decided to hunt for a way to eliminate Plymouth completely and found one that works very well.
Two important packages, mountall and cryptsetup, both have hard dependencies on Plymouth. Debate has raged for a while over whether such dependency is really necessary: supporters claim that Plymouth manages the parallel starting of processes while detractors state their systems behave fine without it.
I like to keep my PCs clean of software that I don't use or don't have a need for. To me, Plymouth fits in that category. Perhaps it's my background in information security that compels me to follow this path; uninstalled software doesn't need to be updated and doesn't present security risks. (Note: I'm not implying that Plymouth, specifically, is riddled with attack vectors. I'm simply offering one possible suggestion for my preferred stance.)
Dave Lentz, a Launchpad contributor, appears to share my philosophy. He's contributed a collection of PPAs containing recompiled Ubuntu packages with various dependencies removed. His mediahacks PPA provides versions of mountall and cryptsetup that no longer depend on Plymouth. I added his PPA to my software sources, replaced my existing mountall and cryptsetup with his, then completely purged all packages related to Plymouth.
I must say I'm now very close to boot-time bliss. My laptop greets me with a comforting stream of flicker-free text-mode status messages and flips into graphics mode only when X starts. This, along with some other tweaks, has reduced my power-on-to-Kickoff-ready time to less than 28 seconds. Shaving seconds matters to me because I can't get hibernate to work with the proprietary nVidia drivers.
I have no need for pretty splash screens that conceal what my computer is doing. If you feel the same, then perhaps you might try the tactic I've described here. If there's one thing I've really come to enjoy about Linux and KDE, it's my on-going saga of successfully bending my computer to my will, not the other way around.
Two important packages, mountall and cryptsetup, both have hard dependencies on Plymouth. Debate has raged for a while over whether such dependency is really necessary: supporters claim that Plymouth manages the parallel starting of processes while detractors state their systems behave fine without it.
I like to keep my PCs clean of software that I don't use or don't have a need for. To me, Plymouth fits in that category. Perhaps it's my background in information security that compels me to follow this path; uninstalled software doesn't need to be updated and doesn't present security risks. (Note: I'm not implying that Plymouth, specifically, is riddled with attack vectors. I'm simply offering one possible suggestion for my preferred stance.)
Dave Lentz, a Launchpad contributor, appears to share my philosophy. He's contributed a collection of PPAs containing recompiled Ubuntu packages with various dependencies removed. His mediahacks PPA provides versions of mountall and cryptsetup that no longer depend on Plymouth. I added his PPA to my software sources, replaced my existing mountall and cryptsetup with his, then completely purged all packages related to Plymouth.
I must say I'm now very close to boot-time bliss. My laptop greets me with a comforting stream of flicker-free text-mode status messages and flips into graphics mode only when X starts. This, along with some other tweaks, has reduced my power-on-to-Kickoff-ready time to less than 28 seconds. Shaving seconds matters to me because I can't get hibernate to work with the proprietary nVidia drivers.
I have no need for pretty splash screens that conceal what my computer is doing. If you feel the same, then perhaps you might try the tactic I've described here. If there's one thing I've really come to enjoy about Linux and KDE, it's my on-going saga of successfully bending my computer to my will, not the other way around.
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