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Since the upgrade on the Purple boot screen I am getting a simple text Ubuntu 12.10 over 4 small pulsing dots

in 12.04 I was getting an image and not text- does this mean anything is wrong?

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Can you provide the output of the following command: update-alternatives --list default.plymouth? – Salem Oct 18 '12 at 20:56
@Salem, the result of that is: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-logo/ubuntu-logo.plymouth – Oldbwl Oct 19 '12 at 5:37
This is ugly. I know that functionally it's not a problem, but is there a way to get the nice screen back? – krumpelstiltskin Oct 31 '12 at 22:08

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

As long as your system boots and shows a GUI after this screen, you should be fine. With that said, you may not be able to access the tty's easily, so if a deep problem arises where you cannot use your graphical environment(or worse, if GRUB were to fail) then it is harder to diagnose it as the screen for GRUB prompts and the tty you can see with Ctrl+Alt+F1 may be unreadable. You can try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 to see whether you get a readable prompt to log in, and use Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to the GUI. If you don't, you should be warned that recovery or TTY mode may be extremely difficult to use.

In a nutshell, it won't hurt anything, but if something breaks, it may be harder to fix it.

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I did get a reasonable prompt on Ctrl+Alt+F1 so that is very reassuring, thanks – Oldbwl Oct 19 '12 at 11:54
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Have the same issue on one of my older boxes. A while ago I read in the ubuntuusers.de wiki it's simply because some Nividia graphic cards/drivers lack support for that type of graphic during boot. Tested it out on an box with Intel graphics and it worked just fine.

So I think it's no big problem other than it's not that nice looking.

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I do have an NVidia GeForce 9600GT - I have used the recommended NVidia driver which gives this problem (but never did on 12.04!) but interestingly, I get a proper shut down screen when I use the Nouveau driver - the Monitor goes to sleep when the boot process has commenced so I can't see if it is working in that version. Yes I do get the GUI and desktop, but I seem to experience a slower desktop with the NVidia driver than I do with the Nouveau one. I did an inplace upgrade, maybe a clean install will do the trick. - I hate being a Noob! – Oldbwl Oct 19 '12 at 5:45
Clean install did not work. The screen showed perfectly on the live CD though!. Oh well – Oldbwl Oct 19 '12 at 23:01

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