Previous to the final release of Ubuntu 9.04 there was a ton of buzz surrounding the new Boot Splash. Personally I don’t see what the big deal is. I am one of those weird people that likes to see the boot output, and have missed it since it was removed. It looks pretty, and I guess that is what they were going for. In any event, I haven’t bothered messing with it until it started conflicting with one of my boot-time applications. At that point I decided it needed to go.
As many of you may know I developed a management tool for Folding@Home clients called Origami. It simplifies the installation of Folding@Home clients and aims to be a set-and-forget kind of tool. The problem is that with the inception of the new Boot Splash the boot-time script for Origami fails. I don’t have any idea how the two of those would be related (if anyone can comment I am very curious), but I can confirm that disabling the splash “fixes” the boot-time issue with Origami. Here I’d like to quickly share now to disable the boot splash for anyone else interested.
Disable Boot Splash
First, for safely, you’ll want to make a backup of your original GRUB menu:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.orig
Second, Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst and remove any mention of ‘splash’ found in the file. You should find one for each configured kernel as well as one slightly above that in the comments. The latter entry defines the default new-entry behavior, and if it is left in place it will re-add the splash to new entries.
Once this is removed you should see the boot output one you restart your machine again. Also, for those running Origami, this should fix any start-time problems until the real core of the issue can be resolved.
Startup Manager
If you’d like to really get in and tweak your boot-time parameters there is a nice GUI tool called Startup Manager. This tool allows you to do what we did above, just via mouse-clicks and a whole lot more. If you’re uncomfortable with the command line, or want to see what else you can do with your boot configuration, check out Startup Manager.
sudo aptitude install startupmanager
About the editing of /boot/menu.lst: You don't have to remove all entries of "splash" on all the kernel entries. It should be enough to change the one in the comments, and then run "update-grub"
Have you checked if the Origami is trying to output something stdout or stderr? Perhaps the splash feature is closing one or or the both of the expected outputs and that causes the Origami to fail?
Thanks man. Now my Eee starts up in true Linux style :D.