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I was interested in playing around with XFCE. I made a liveCD and played around with it a bit and really liked it. I thought that instead of installing Xubuntu itself I would just install the metapackages on my already existing Ubuntu.

So, I tried it out by installing XFCE4 and then later xubuntu-desktop on my Ubuntu 12.04. Neither had the exact same style as the liveCD which I preferred, so I decided to delete XFCE from my computer and install a partition instead.

Through Synaptic I removed XFCE4 (and completely removed xfce-notifyd so that my notifications would work with the Unity style again). I later went on to remove most of the packages and their dependencies that came with xubuntu-desktop, and I think that removed a lot of it.

While my desktop now works perfectly, it has changed two things. For one, the Xubuntu welcome screen comes out instead of the Ubuntu one (though I have to say the Xubuntu screen looks a LOT nicer). I'd still rather it say Ubuntu. Secondly, I had tweaked Grub with grub-customizer to have an image I found of Ubuntu that was really cool. Now when Grub starts up, it has a picture of Debian (I think that's random but maybe it comes with Xubuntu?). I can probably just change the second one but still I'm just curious.

Can anyone help me get the old Ubuntu screen back?

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  • Been playing around with it more and I noticed that, 1) I can't change the Debian background in Grub, in the grub-customizer it says that I still have my old image. 2) Some of the old notifications from XFCE are still coming in, like the updates notification, and now whenever something crashes it puts the notification that shows in XFCE. Any help? Aug 7, 2012 at 22:16
  • All right, I was playing around with it again, this time trying to bring back the default ubuntu splash-screen. I used Ubuntu in a virtual machine and rewrote the default.plymouth and text.plymouth file in my actual Ubuntu partition the same way it came in the vm, I also added the default.grub file that wasn't in my Ubuntu partition but was in the vm, and I deleted the xubuntu-logo and xubuntu-text files in my partition. Now, when I restarted my computer, it shows no screen at all, just a black screen until Ubuntu boots up. Please, are there any suggestions out there? Aug 8, 2012 at 0:34

3 Answers 3

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I did the same XFCE experiment and was also annoyed that the Xubuntu startup logo showed up even after I (supposedly) completely uninstalled XFCE.

Pavan's answer hints at the solution that I eventually discovered. Note that my solution was done in Ubuntu 12.04 (probably works for other versions, but YMMV):

These files control are where Ubuntu gets it's start up sequence resources:

/lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth
/lib/plymouth/themes/text.plymouth

However, they are actually symlinks to two more symlinks which point to the actual source files:

/etc/alternatives/default.plymouth
/etc/alternatives/text.plymouth

So the solution is to delete the /etc/alternatives/ links and point them at the original ubuntu resources. Open a terminal and execute these commands:

> cd /etc/alternatives
Check out where these alternatives links are pointing to:
> ls -la *.plymouth

Remove these intermediate links (in /etc/alternatives):
> sudo rm default.plymouth
> sudo rm text.plymouth

Create new links to the original Ubuntu resources:
> sudo ln -s /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth default.plymouth
> sudo ln -s /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-text/ubuntu-text.plymouth text.plymouth

You should also remove the Xubuntu resources for good housekeeping:

> sudo rm -rf /lib/plymouth/themes/xubuntu-logo
> sudo rm -rf /lib/plymouth/themes/xubuntu-text

After doing all that, try rebooting and you should see your familiar old Ubuntu start up logo.

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    The files you remove belong to the packages named plymouth-theme-xubuntu-logo and plymouth-theme-xubuntu-text. Instead of deleting the files you should probably just remove the packages with apt-get. Feb 8, 2013 at 1:36
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Does your /lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth refer to the right ImageDir & ScriptFile ? It should point to ubuntu-themes directory.

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Per Mark Paskal's answer, I had the same problem on Ubuntu 17.04. I just used:

sudo apt remove plymouth-theme-xubuntu-logo plymouth-theme-xubuntu-text

The files were removed and the links redirected to the original file as per the above.

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