I could not get it to work. I played around with /etc/default/grub and the
/etc/grub,d/ files but I had no luck (those are the files where other people
suggest changes should be made). It would either show the same mess or
nothing at all. I do not have sufficient knowledge of the boot/startup
process to diagnose this further.
I also tried doing the uvesafb fix
(http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/lucidubuntu-10-04-high-resolution-plymouth-virtual-terminal-for-atinvidia-cards-with-proprietaryrestricted-driver/)
but that did not work either.
From what I've gathered the problem is that it takes too long for the
Plymouth driver(?) to load before the desktop is ready. It seems to be
because it starts too late
(http://askubuntu.com/questions/79953/why-does-plymouth-start-so-late). But
the live CD works correctly, so either the the installed settings differ from
that of the live CD or the CD is just so much slower than the hard drive to
allow it to load sooner. As a note, I upgraded the hard drive to a 7200 drive
(was 5400 before) but I cannot imagine that that would play a role. I
installed Fedora 16 on the exact same hardware and Plymouth worked correctly.
I've also got a Dell GX280 with onboard Intel graphics and Plymouth works
correctly. It's running Trisquel 5 32-bit. Incidentally this machine has a
5400 hard drive.
My only suggestion right now is that if the corrupted graphics are too
annoying you can edit /etc/default/grub and look for the line that says:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
and remove the "splash". If you do that, remember to run
# update-grub
when you're done. That should stop Plymouth from displaying, though I still
got a very brief flash of some corrupted graphics but it was not the same as
the corrupted Plymouth graphics,
Unfortunately, I won't be looking at this issue for a while because I'm
running Debian on the Thinkpad now (without Plymouth, though) and I do not
have any other hardware to test with.
If somebody wants to test this further:
- do an Ubuntu 11.04 (I think that's Trisquel 5's base) install on the same
machine and see if the problem persists,
- do the installs on both 7200 and 5400 hard drives.
If Ubuntu works on the same machine with both drive speeds, or at least on
the drive where Trisquel's Plymouth is corrupted, then the problem lies with
Trisquel. I don't know if Trisquel makes any changes to startup, though.
Otherwise it could be that it just starts too late and a slower hard drive
gives it enough time to load. In which case someone with a better
understanding of the startup load order might be able to help?
