How do deactivate plymouth boot screen?

Question

Lately, booting Ubuntu on my desktop has become seriously slow. We're talking two minutes. It used to take 10-20 seconds. Because of plymouth, I can't see what's going on. I would like to deactivate it, but not really uninstall it. What's the quickest way to do that? I'm using Precise, but I suspect a solution for 11.10 would work just as well.

Answer 1

Easiest quick fix is to edit the grub line as you boot.

Hold down the shift key so you see the menu. Hit the e key to edit

Edit the 'linux' line, remove the 'quiet' and 'splash'

To disable it in the long run

Edit /etc/default/grub

Change the line – GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

And then update grub

sudo update-grub

Answer 2

If you just want to see the message for a single boot (vs. a permanent change), you should be able to press the ESC key to hide the splash screen and reveal the boot console.

Answer 3

Alternatively to quiet splash kernel parameters alsord.plymouth=0 plymouth.enable=0 kernel parameters can be used.

Either boot and modify parameters in grub console (c) or add to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.plymouth=0 plymouth.enable=0"

And then regenerate grub config:

# update-grub
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-28-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-28-amd64
done

Answer 4

How about pressing CTRL+ALT+F2 for console allowing you to see whats going on.. You can go back to GUI/Plymouth by CTRL+ALT+F7.

Don't have my laptop here right now, but IIRC Plymouth has upstart job in /etc/init, named plymouth???.conf, renaming that probably achieves what you want too more permanent manner.