After installing Ubuntu 7.10 I could see it was still suffering from the annoying little bug all previous versions have: instead of the neat splash screen during booting, all I got was the LCD’s warning sign saying “Input not supported”.
After finding rest of the shiny new OS very likeable I decided to solve this problem at last. It was safe to proceed on this bold assumption that I could, because in all Ubuntu installations I’ve done the problem has not manifested itself until the first booting into the freshly-installed system. That is to say, the live CD does not have this problem, but displays the splash with no problems, so I knew there must be a way to make it work.
There was a helpful link on the Ubuntu Forums on how to fix a faulty splash screen. In the end, it was simply a matter of finding the right display mode -describing parameters for a couple of config files. As for the parameters, I initially tried to find them from the live CD, but apparently it’s using a different system from the one used by an installed Ubuntu (GRUB), so this path turned out to be harder than a simple trial and error.
First I tried a full-blown 1280×1024 pixels with 16.8M colors, which is the display mode that the desktop starts in and works just fine, but that didn’t work – which I probably could have guessed from the fact that the other config file, usplash.conf, already had this resolution.
Then I thought about the way Windows XP boots on this system: the logo looks a bit crude, as if with a lower resolution and color depth than on the desktop. So I tried 800×600 with a modest 256 colors – and already on the way down Ubuntu now displayed the splash screen! The reboot revealed final success: the splash screen now works.
To be short but exact, what I did to make it work was:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
so that at the very end of the first kernel line, after “splash” , I addedvga=771
– this corresponds to the SVGA mode of 800×600 pixels with 256 colors.sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf
so thatxres=800
yres=600sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`