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Every time my laptop boots, I am greeted by several "Ubuntu 13.10 has experienced an internal error" dialogs once the graphical desktop environment (whatever it's called) is displayed. Apparently the problem originates from plymouthd, which is (unsurprisingly) the daemon of the Plymouth boot splash application.

Has anyone ever found a fix for this type of issue?

(I would provide log excerpts but I'm not sure where to find them.)

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  • 19
    How is this a duplicate???
    – GOTO 0
    Mar 23, 2014 at 23:45
  • 5
    I agree, this is not a duplicate...
    – Serp C
    Aug 19, 2015 at 2:12
  • I would expect a duplicate accusation would go accompanied with a link to the duplicate to avoid any discussion
    – Jakke
    Dec 12, 2015 at 2:37
  • 1
    There is nothing in the linked duplicate references plymouthd whatsoever. Vote to reopen. Nov 4, 2016 at 4:38
  • The bug report is here but unassigned: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/1542000
    – 林果皞
    Sep 14, 2017 at 4:33

5 Answers 5

42

I have experienced the same error when I first installed Ubuntu 13.10 on the toshiba harman/kardon this week.

I solved the error with a single command:
Open a Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type:

sudo chown -R $USER: /lib/plymouth

Then all the permission issues are solved and the error is gone in the next boot.

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  • 7
    Is 'user:user' supposed to my my user name? Or ...? As it stands the answer does not make sense to me. Thanks.
    – Art Swri
    Jul 18, 2014 at 14:44
  • 4
    This solution doesn't look very clean. What to do if the computer is multi-user?
    – bli
    Aug 18, 2014 at 16:36
  • 4
    Possible solution : sudo chmod 755 -R /lib/plymouth
    – Marko
    Feb 20, 2015 at 21:26
  • 6
    It didn't actually worked for my multi-user system. I removed plymouth. To do that, open /etc/default/grub as root, and change line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quite splash", to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="verbose "
    – Marko
    Feb 20, 2015 at 22:20
  • 3
    This directory does not exist. Feb 7, 2017 at 21:21
30
sudo apt-get install plymouth-x11 

That did help me with the issue.

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  • 12
    Tested and apparently working on Ubuntu 16.04
    – 29axe
    Mar 17, 2017 at 9:16
  • 1
    My case is very similar to @29axe's one, but I had to install only plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo to avoid the problem on XUbuntu 16.04.
    – Беров
    Aug 29, 2017 at 18:02
  • 1
    Not working on Ubuntu Gnome 17.04
    – 29axe
    Sep 1, 2017 at 13:09
  • 2
    Tested in Xubuntu 16.04.3 and working.
    – logoff
    Sep 6, 2017 at 7:17
  • 3
    This happened to me on upgrading from 18.04 to 18.10, installing plymouth-x11 fixed it.
    – Stuart
    Nov 1, 2018 at 11:02
8

A possible solution not mentioned here is to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure Plymouth

From: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-gnome-default-settings/+bug/1536771

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  • 2
    Worked for me on 16.04 / Gnome (/lib/plymouth doesn't exist so the accepted answer does not apply) Jan 19, 2018 at 4:05
  • 3
    Worked for me on 18.10 / Gnome Jan 3, 2019 at 12:03
  • 1
    18.10 here, same problem on an upgrade, no /lib/plymouth nor /var/lib/plymouth - and this worked. Looks like a cleaner answer too. Jan 10, 2019 at 14:01
  • 1
    worked for me for a while,trying again now ubuntu 18.10 Feb 1, 2019 at 9:36
  • 2
    I can also confirm that this worked on Ubuntu 18.10. Thanks a lot.
    – Pankaj
    Mar 10, 2019 at 6:00
3

I was experiencing this problem, also. I found out that /lib/plymouth did not exist. I installed plymouth using Synaptic (but you can use whatever pkg installer you like), and it fixed the problem.

There are other plymouth packages, but it looked like they were already installed for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 64 bit, which is what I am using. I also discovered that when I installed Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 32 bit, I didn't have this problem. For me, it was only a problem with the 64 bit install.

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In my case (Ubuntu Gnome 17.04), when I looked at the error details, it said the error was that /var/log/boot.log didn't exist. I just did 'sudo touch /var/log/boot.log' and the error went away.

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