Changing Plymouth Themes In Ubuntu 10.04

One of the major changes in Ubuntu 10.04 is that Plymouth is now managing the fancy boot graphics, instead of xsplash. While the default Plymouth theme is decent, I wanted something different. Fortunately, changing the Plymouth theme only takes a few lines on the CLI.

If you run apt-cache search plymouth-theme, you’ll see which themes are available in the default repositories. This Youtube search has some videos of what is available. I chose the plymouth-theme-solar package, which has a nice solar flare animation. Next, run the following code, which I found here. Keep in mind that you need to change it to point to the plymouth theme you want to use.

sudo update-alternatives --install \
/lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth default.plymouth \
/lib/plymouth/themes/solar/solar.plymouth 100

(note: Line warping was only used to make it look pretty on a blog post.)

Next run sudo update-alternatives –config default.plymouth. You’ll see a numbered menu of the themes currently installed. Type the number for the one you want and hit enter. Finally, use sudo update-initramfs -u to apply your changes.

Here is the result:

There are not many themes available currently. However, once 10.04 is released and has been out for a little while, I think there will be many more options.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Technology, Ubuntu. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 comments

  1. Manolo
    26 May, 2010 at 11:05 am

    Hi.

    Thanks for your guide. Two questions.

    FIRST: what does that “1oo” is used for, in the following command
    /lib/plymouth/themes/solar/solar.plymouth 100
    ?

    SECOND: is there any way to test the plymouth without rebooting? I have been trying with burg-emu but it just seems to play the last executed plymouth at boot, and not the last configured one.

    Thank you.

  2. Anon
    6 June, 2010 at 6:25 am

    @Manolo:
    To answer your second question, try installing plymouth X11. See http://brej.org/blog/?p=158 for instructions. Then you can test your plymouth themes without leaving your desktop ;)