A Closer Look At Red Hat's Plymouth (Phoronix)

[Posted November 5, 2008 by ris]

Phoronix takes a look at Plymouth, a flicker-free boot process previewing in Fedora 10. "Plymouth has an extensive API that allows artists and programmers to develop graphically rich Plymouth plug-ins. Plymouth is, however, compiled into the system's initial RAM disk (initrd) so there are some limitations. Plug-ins though can rely on loading PNG images as libpng is linked to Plymouth. The plug-ins currently available through the project's git repository currently include details, fade-in, pulser, solar, spinfinity, and text. These plug-ins are also packaged in RPM form on Fedora 10. The Fedora 10 RPMs include plymouth (the main graphical boot package), plymouth-devel (the libraries and headers), plymouth-gdm-hooks (provides integrated with GDM), plymouth-libs (the Plymouth libraries), plymouth-plugin-fade-in, plymouth-plugin-label, plymouth-plugin-pulser, plymouth-plugin-solar, plymouth-plugin-spinfinity, plymouth-scripts (scripts to assist in configuring Plymouth), plymouth-text-and-details-only (intended for those not interested in a rich boot experience), and plymouth-utils (utilities related to Plymouth)."