Bugzilla Bug 274065

Plymouth is a very advanced bootsplash that can show also show animations and
supports DRM/kernel modesetting, so if the graphical drivers support it the
transition from VT to X is flickerless. I think it would be cool to add it to
Portage - at least the users with kernel modesetting drivers might welcome it.

As the project started on Fedora, a Gentoo user already asked on the Plymouth
mailing list how it would be possible to install it on Gentoo and got this
response:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/plymouth/2009-May/000087.html

If you want to see what Plymouth is capable of you can see an earlier version
on Fedora 10, tested by Phoronix:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njg3Nw
...or just search the YouTube :P

There's some more info about the project on Fedora's wiki:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterStartup

I'm very much in favor of this. Has there been any progress on this?

First someone would have to make a working ebuild that installs the libs/bins
to the correct places.
Next step is to get initscripts make it apperes during boot, disappear when it
is logintime, maybe also appear during shutdown time.
Last step is to make a patch for genkernel so it is possible to place it into
an initramfs.

Currently I know of noone working on this, and I hope this bug will remain
silent until someone has something to present, like for example anything of the
above, or need help getting the pieces together.

Comments about "I want this too" will not help, only spam this bugreport and
possibly irritate CCs.
But comments like "I have done something and need help with it" will help.

At least there seems to be an ebuild for it:
http://gentoo-overlays.zugaina.org/bangert/portage/sys-boot/plymouth/

Created an attachment (id=208174) [details]
sys-boot/plymouth-0.7.2.ebuild

Updated ebuild for 0.7.2

Created an attachment (id=208176) [details]
0001-Gentoo-does-not-have-dev-fb-but-dev-fb0-at-least-on-.patch

Patch that was necessary to get plymouth running on my system. Might be solved
better using some udev-foo.

Created an attachment (id=208201) [details]
plymouth-0.7.2-r1.ebuild

plymouth-set-default-theme script requires "nash", so added runtime dep for
sys-apps/mkinitrd

It does not really need mkinitrd, you can just as well omit it from the deps.

Having that as a rdepend is somewhat like *-sources rdepend on genkernel
becouse it is offers a convenient way to generate kernel- and initrd- files.

Well it feels like it needs something, as the script errors when you run it
without the package.  Maybe it should be an option as a use flag?

nash dependency has been removed 3 days ago:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/plymouth/commit/?id=8e70c530ea2937ac5a621e7974e35554108f2e2b

General question: does it work? I mean did you managed to make it run? I found
an another guide http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Plymouth but can't make
use of it.
Can you list down steps briefly for Gentoo specifically?

I've gotten it to run before. It's not horribly difficult. I did something
similar to Fedora's method. I hacked at their mkinitrd to work reasonably well
with Gentoo, compiled/installed Plymouth, set up my kernel to use KMS by
default on Radeon cards (and of course enabled initrd support), and set
grub.conf to use the initrd.

There are some pretty gaping holes feature-wise, though. Gentoo's init system
doesn't currently signal Plymouth to let it know whether there's progress, an
error, etc. So it will stay on the graphical boot screen until it gets
terminated (I set /etc/init.d/local to do this via some command similar to
"plymouth --exit"), the user switches VTs or hits escape, or until X starts.
It's pretty, but somewhat less functional than you might like.

Plymouth's git repository has some documentation about how to get it to work
nicely (in INSTALL or README, I can't remember which).