Plymouth is an application originally developed by Red Hat and later adopted basically by all the most commonly used Linux distributions. The software runs very early in the boot process, and provides eye-candy animations which accompany the user until he is prompted to login into the system. When Plymouth is used, boot messages are hidden, although they can be visualized simply by clicking the esc key. Some users, however, may prefer to visualize boot messages by default, and avoid any animation.
In this article we see how disable Plymouth animations on some of the most used Linux distributions.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to disable Plymouth on Fedora
- How to disable Plymouth on Ubuntu
- How to disable Plymouth on OpenSuse
- How to temporarily change Grub configuration
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Distribution-independent |
| Software | No specific software required |
| Other | None |
| Conventions | # – requires given linux-commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux-commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Introduction
Disabling Plymouth on the Linux distributions which implement it by default, involves basically the same steps, with few differences: all we have to do is to modify some boot parameters in the /etc/default/grub file (more specifically the value of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable), and than regenerate the Grub configuration. Let’s see how to perform the needed steps on Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuse.
Disabling Plymouth on Fedora
To disable Plymouth on Fedora, we open the /etc/default/grub file with our favorite text editor, add the rd.plymouth=0 and plymouth.enable=0 parameters into the string which is used as value of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable, and remove the quiet and optionally the rhgb ones, instead. The line should look similar to the following. Of course, other parameters can be present, depending on your setup:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.plymouth=0 plymouth.enable=0"
The option above will make so that Plymouth is disabled completely. After we save the change, we can reload the grub configuration, by running the following command:
$ sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Disabling Plymouth on Ubuntu
Disabling Plymouth on Ubuntu is just as easy. In the case of the distribution made in Canonical, when editing the Grub configuration file, what we have to do is to remove the quiet and splash parameters. What actually enables the Plymouth boot animation is the latter, while the former is used to prevent boot messages to be displayed, since they would conflict with the animation. Once we remove both parameters, we need to regenerate the bootloader configuration. On Ubuntu it is done by running the update-grub script, which is a wrapper around the vanilla “grub-mkconfig” command:
$ sudo update-grub
Disabling Plymouth on OpenSuse
Similarly to the examples above, to disable Plymouth and the splash screen which is displayed when OpenSuse is loading, in the /etc/default/grub file, we have to remove the splash=silent and the quiet parameters. On the distribution of the “Chamaleon”, to regenerate the bootloader configuration we can use the following command:
$ sudo update-bootloader
The
/usr/sbin/update-bootloader script is a wrapper written in perl, which is smart enough to update whatever bootloader is installed (Grub is not the only one supported, by it is the default). If the configuration is updated correctly, on the next reboot we will see no splash screen anymore, and boot messages will be clearly visible.
Changing Grub parameters temporarily
In the examples above, we saw how to perform the needed changes to the Grub bootloader configuration in order to disable the Plymouth splash screen, and make the boot messages visible. If you are not sure you want to do those modifications permanently, you can just test it by temporarily modifying Grub parameters. Here is how you can do it. In the Grub menu which is displayed before booting, just highlight the entry you want and press e, than perform the changes in the line starting with “linux”:
When you are done modifying the entry, just press
Ctrl-x to boot. The changes will be discarded on the next reboot. Please notice that in Ubuntu, by default, the Grub menu is not displayed by design; to enable it we need to change the value of the following Grub variables in /etc/default/grub: the GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE variable value should be changed from “hidden” to “menu”, and the GRUB_TIMEOUT variable value should be changed from 0 to 10 (this change will give us enough time to choose an entry from the menu, before the default one is auto-loaded).
Conclusions
In this article we learned how to disable boot animations on some of the most used Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse. The boot animations, on Linux, are provided by Plymouth, a software originally developed by Red Hat, which can be easily disabled by modifying the Grub bootloader configuration.
