Plymouth – Installing and Configuring Boot Screen on Debian

By default Debian Distribution doesn’t come with a boot screen, but just bunch of debug messages on booting. I know I run a server-like distribution, but I like using it as a Desktop PC, Linux is Linux right? And there comes Plymouth

Plymouth presents a graphic animation (also known as bootsplash) while the boot process is occurring in the background. It is designed to be used with the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) modesetting drivers.

Plymouth is available on the default Debian Repository, install using APT

$ sudo apt install plymouth plymouth-themes

I need to add modesetting for your graphics card by editing /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add these lines

# KMS
intel_agp
drm
i915 modeset=1

# KMS
drm
nouveau modeset=1

# KMS
drm
radeon modeset=1

My default bootloader is grub2, I am going to edit /etc/default/grub

I have to tell grub our default screen resolution, on booting, modules and drivers are not loaded yet. I can fetch our screen resolution by typing:

$ xdpyinfo | grep dimensions
dimensions:    1366x768 pixels (361x203 millimeters)

Here my resolution is 1366×768. I am going to find the line #GRUB_GFXMODE=640×480 in /etc/default/grub , uncomment the line and add in my resolution. Making it

GRUB_GFXMODE=1366x768

Search for this line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=„quiet“ and change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Finally, update my grub configuration

$ sudo update-grub2

On installing, I installed plymouth-themes package, this installs some default Plymouth themes. To view installed themes, type:

$ sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -l
details
fade-in
glow
script
solar
spinfinity
spinner
text
tribar

Selecting a default theme from the list of available theme above

$ sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R glow

Then reboot to see effect.

We are not only limited to themes Plymouth provided, I can install a custom theme. Download a theme and move the folder to /usr/share/plymouth/themes and still list and select the theme from the example above.