Script To Fix The Ubuntu Plymouth For Proprietary Nvidia And ATI Graphics Drivers

Installing the proprietary Nvidia or ATI graphics drivers in Ubuntu (10.04 or 10.10) will make Plymouth (the boot screen) look very big and ugly. The script in this post should fix this.


If you're looking for an easy way to fix the Plymouth in Ubuntu, search no more: there's a script which fixes the Plymouth for both ATI and Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers.

Personal rant: I've found this script on d0rkye's blog and I liked that it displays the supported screen resolutions and you can enter the best resolution for your system but comparing it to kyleabaker's script, it looks like he copied most of the code from there (except the resolution thingy) - that's made clear by 2 bugs in the script (one was also in the initial script and the other is a "variable" used in the first) so don't use the original script posted on d0rkye's blog as the last part won't work!

Now, back to the script and fixing the Plymouth.

Fix The Ubuntu Plymouth with proprietary Nvidia or ATI graphics drivers

Warning: use it at your own risk! Only use this script if you know your way on the command line and can revert everything manually in case something goes wrong. I've used it to fix the Plymouth on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (with proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers) but I cannot guarantee it will also work for you (and that it won't break stuff). The script should work with both Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

To fix Plymouth, run the following commands (will download and run the script):

cd
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/57638460/fixplymouth
chmod +x fixplymouth
./fixplymouth

Or you can manually download the script from HERE.

Warning: only run the script once!

After running it, the script will display a list of screen resolutions supported by Plymouth (specific for your computer). Enter the best resolution from the list displayed by the script under the following format: 1024x768-24 (this is just an example)! This is the only difference between this script and Kyleabaker's script (in which you had edit the script with your Plymouth screen resolution and most people never knew what's the maximum resolution supported by Plymouth for their computers).


If hwinfo (which is automatically ran by the script) doesn't display the supported resolutions for your monitor, see the second solution from HERE.

Revert the changes made by this script

All the changes made by this script can be reverted using kyleabaker's revert script. There is a download link at the end of THIS post.

Credits for the script in this post: d0rkye and kyleabaker.