plymouth always shows a splash screen regardless of whether 'splash' is on the command line

I should add the reason I've changed that init-top script is to work around this bug by never switching the splash screen on

Hi Tim,

When you say plymouth shows a splash screen, what exactly do you see? plymouth will *run* unconditionally on boot, because it's needed to broker boot-time console I/O; but on a server there should be no graphical boot splash support *installed* by default, and booting without 'splash' on the commandline should cause no splash screen to be displayed - only the details plugin (plaintext output).

The initramfs-tools script should also not be used by default; there are only a limited number of cases in which this script will be installed in the initramfs at all (see the initramfs hook script for details).

Finally, the problematic script you mention, /etc/rcS.d/S05keymap.sh, is not part of the standard 10.04 LTS install. This seems to be provided by a 'console-common' package in universe. Do you know why you have that package installed - pulled in as a dependency, carried over as part of an upgrade from a previous release?

On 19 May 2011, at 22:12, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Hi Tim,
>
> When you say plymouth shows a splash screen, what exactly do you see?
> plymouth will *run* unconditionally on boot, because it's needed to
> broker boot-time console I/O; but on a server there should be no
> graphical boot splash support *installed* by default, and booting
> without 'splash' on the commandline should cause no splash screen to be
> displayed - only the details plugin (plaintext output).
>
> The initramfs-tools script should also not be used by default; there are
> only a limited number of cases in which this script will be installed in
> the initramfs at all (see the initramfs hook script for details).
>
> Finally, the problematic script you mention, /etc/rcS.d/S05keymap.sh, is
> not part of the standard 10.04 LTS install. This seems to be provided
> by a 'console-common' package in universe. Do you know why you have
> that package installed - pulled in as a dependency, carried over as part
> of an upgrade from a previous release?

Hi Steve, you set me to thinking, and I think I now know what's going on. I noticed this when trying to use FAI to install Ubuntu servers. It looks like my FAI tried to install ubuntu-minimal, which despite its name appears to include some stuff targeted at the desktop version. Mea culpa.

Nevertheless, there does seem to be a conflict between this console-common script and plymouth's splash screen. It's probably really a bug with the console tools rather than plymouth. There are several similar bug reports around. For example, there's a fairly long standing bug report in Debian which no-one's done anything about:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=500831

which I suspect is related.

Sorry for wasting your time with this one, Steve - feel free to reassign to the console stuff as a normal priority bug if you wish. And thanks for pointing me to what I'd done wrong...

Tim

> It looks like my FAI tried to install ubuntu-minimal, which despite its
> name appears to include some stuff targeted at the desktop version.

On the contrary, ubuntu-minimal is minimal and doesn't pull in anything desktop-specific. It will pull in upstart->mountall->plymouth->plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text, but that's not a graphical splash screen, only a text one.

> Nevertheless, there does seem to be a conflict between this console-
> common script and plymouth's splash screen. It's probably really a bug
> with the console tools rather than plymouth.

Yeah, I think that's the case; talking with Colin Watson, I understand that console-common is meant to be removed altogether but hasn't quite been obsoleted.

Reassigning this to console-tools, which seems to be the primary culprit.