10.10 "Ubuntu and Five Red Dots" gone during loading

[johncc]

After an automatic upgrade on Saturday and Sunday. Now during booting, the screen is black until eventually the desktop appears. Well, almost black-- early on there is a quick flash in the top left corner of the screen, I think it says "acpid client 0.0 disconnected".

The desktop comes up and seems to work just fine.

What is it that puts the "Ubuntu" and Five Red Dots on the screen, is it grub2, or is it gdm, or X, or is it some other "in between" process? (Sometimes in the past I have gotten the text-only "Ubuntu 10.10" instead of the graphic 5 dots. At that time I was thinking it was something about grub2 not dealing with my monitor resolution properly. But I'm not so sure).

Thanks,
John

[CharlesA]

That's the splash screen.

It's normally enabled by default on Ubuntu desktop.

Check to see if grub has the option that says "splash"

[lavinog]

Plymouth is the boot process that allows for the graphical boot.
It requires that your graphic drivers to work.

What graphic card do you have?
Are you using proprietary drivers (nvidia or fglrx)

Does it happen everytime you reboot?

You might want to install bootchart and see what the timeline looks like, it could be that ureadahead is reading too much data.

[johncc]

That's the splash screen.

It's normally enabled by default on Ubuntu desktop.

Check to see if grub has the option that says "splash"

Yes that option is there, in /etc/default/grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.

[johncc]

Plymouth is the boot process that allows for the graphical boot.
It requires that your graphic drivers to work.

What graphic card do you have?
Are you using proprietary drivers (nvidia or fglrx)

Does it happen everytime you reboot?

You might want to install bootchart and see what the timeline looks like, it could be that ureadahead is reading too much data.

I think I am using the nvidia proprietary?

master@MasterBlaster:/etc/grub.d$ dmesg | grep nvidia
[ 16.337833] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[ 18.097375] nvidia 0000:00:10.0: PCI INT A -> Link[SGRU] -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22
[ 18.097383] nvidia 0000:00:10.0: setting latency timer to 64
master@MasterBlaster:/etc/grub.d$ grep -i nvidia /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[ 18.270] (II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
[ 18.270] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module 173.14.28 Wed Sep 29 10:17:05 PDT 2010
[ 18.307] (II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
[ 18.307] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so
[ 18.307] (II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
[ 18.307] (II) NVIDIA dlloader X Driver 173.14.28 Wed Sep 29 09:55:18 PDT 2010
[ 18.307] (II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs
[ 18.323] (II) NVIDIA(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
[ 18.323] (**) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32


It happens every boot, but only since this weekend. Before that, it gave the nice graphic "Ubuntu" with the 5 red dots...what image file is that? I've looked through the /boot/grub/grub.cfg "WALLPAPER" code and can't seem to figure out where it gets that image from. But then, is "wallpaper" different than "splash"? (I'm thinking wallpaper shows up behind the grub menu, splash is while the kernel and os is being loaded by grub?)

Oh, and by bootchart do you mean "pybootchartgui"?

master@MasterBlaster:/etc/grub.d$ bootchart
The program 'bootchart' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install pybootchartgui


Thanks!
John

[CharlesA]

There was a kernel update recently, have you reinstall the proprietary driver since then?

[johncc]

There was a kernel update recently, have you reinstall the proprietary driver since then?

No, I hadn't, didn't realize I needed to do that. Now I have though, it upgraded from driver 173 to 260.

Still same problem though. But this time I was able to get a look at the message flashing by, I was incorrect before-- the message is "mountall: disconnected from Plymouth"

Thanks,
John

[CharlesA]

The splash screen is plymouth. Not sure what could be causing it, or the fix, but I know I've seen it before when I used "nobootwait" in fstab.

[johncc]

The splash screen is plymouth. Not sure what could be causing it, or the fix, but I know I've seen it before when I used "nobootwait" in fstab.

Hmm, no "nobootwait" in my fstab.

Found a thread from October that suggested


echo FRAMEBUFFER=y > /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash
update-initramfs -u

So I did that, and it worked. It then gave me the "Ugly Text" Ubuntu 10.10 with four dots, loading, so I went to StartUp Manager and changed it from 640x480 8-bit to 800x600 16 bit, and now I have the "Pretty" graphics Ubuntu screen while loading.

Cheers,
John