Change Splash Screen in Ubuntu

A splash screen is a graphical screen that appears before a system/application is launching. In Linux, it refers to the animation screen comes when staring up and shuting down the system.

The initial bootscreen is rendered by software called Plymouth, which uses the kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) driver to show graphical animation with the native resolution of the display even before X server starts.

Installation

Download splash screen themes

You can either download custom themes from Gnome-look.org or simply run sudo apt-get install plymouth-themes to install some existing themes in the repository.

Install new theme

If you choose to download custom themes, you need to install it after.

Note: In Ubuntu 16, the location of plymouth themes is changed from /lib/plymouth/themes to /usr/share/plymouth/themes.

Extract the theme and copy to /usr/share/plymouth/themes.

Then run update-alternatives to make the theme list selectable:

$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth default.plymouth /usr/share/plymouth/themes/your_theme/your_theme.plymouth 100

Now switch default.plymouth by running update-alternatives as follows:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

Enter the number that corresponds to the custom theme that was just installed.

Finally, re-generate an initramfs image:

$ sudo update-initramfs -u