Cat - a plymouth theme

This is a fork of a lovely PlymouthTheme-Cat by krishnan793. Since I really liked this old theme, I decided to improve it a bit. Now the animation differs for booting and shutdown modes. After playing some number of frames the animation is seamlessly looping.

wakeup full animation:	asleep full animation:
wakeup endless looping part:	asleep endless looping part:

Installation

Clone this repository somewhere.

git clone https://github.com/derVedro/PlymouthTheme-Cat.git

Then copy the cat directory into your plymouth themes directory.

cd PlymouthTheme-Cat; sudo cp -r cat /usr/share/plymouth/themes/

The next steps may vary from distribution to distribution:

On most distros

(Tested on openSUSE Tumbleweed)

Set GRUB2 up

Check /etc/default/grub. It should include the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

• If there are other parameters defined in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="..." you don't have to remove them unless they conflict with the ones above.
• quiet and splash are required to start plymouth
• Additionally you might have to enable KMS e.g. in case you're using integrated graphics by Intel by adding i915.modeset=1.

Reconfigure GRUB2, if you had to add something:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Activate the theme

Check that the theme ended up in the right place:

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme --list

Set the theme as default:

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme cat -R

The -R option rebuilds the initrd automatically which is necessary.

On Ubuntu

Install the theme.

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth default.plymouth /usr/share/plymouth/themes/cat/cat.plymouth 100

Select the default theme.

sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

Update the initramfs image.

sudo update-initramfs -u

Now reboot.

If you want to install this on < Ubuntu 16.04, change the path from /usr/share/plymouth to /lib/plymouth/ . You need to do this on the cat.plymouth file also.

Test theme

To test the current theme you can use the preview-plymouth-theme.sh bash script from repository root directory. You should run it as root. You can pass the preview duration as an optional argument to the script. Be warned if you pass large time values. Plymouth takes over the keyboard input, so it is unfortunately not possible to cancel the preview with CTRL+C.

sudo ./preview-plymouth-theme.sh [TIME_IN_SECONDS]

FAQ

My disk is enctrypted, I do not see the password prompt. What should I do?

The password input field is masked. Just type your password during startup in and do not forget to hit enter.

The boot animation is too slow / fast. Is there anything I can do about it?

Yes, you can edit SKIP_TICKS value in cat.script file. The higher the value, the slower is the animation played.