New Plymouth theme in Luna

Use cases:
  * LiveCD boot - boot screeen is shown for up to to several minutes
  * Usual boot - shown for 1-5 seconds
  * Boot with filesystem check - takes from 5-10sec to a minute, displays info about the process

Reference:
  http://www.pilipe.com.ar/content/plymouth-greeting-message-mockup
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75_qyL7U2ME
  https://launchpad.net/plymouth-greeter
  http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/?content=129696
  http://whyareyoureadingthisurl.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/login-screen-mockups/
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Boot (lots of stuff, but some great animations)

LightDM greeter:
  http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/Desktop-Log-In-251559180
  http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/Pantheon-Greeter-298937566

Done:
  * Examine LightDM theming, check if the Plymouth→LightDM transition is smooth (we need it to be smoother than Plymouth→GDM). There's no transition at all, so we'll have to make the webkit greeter handle it. Good coordination between shnatsel (Plymouth theme dev) and agent00tai (LightDM greeter dev) is needed.

Remaining TODO items:
  * Get a mockup from DanRabbit (or approved by him). Should we show elementary OS logo or wordmark? What's the best way to indicate that the system is not yet ready?
  * Implement the main theme
  * Integrate the script plugin modifications that we might need (or find a way to deal with the damn upstart and make a separate executable that talks to plymouth)
  * Add a fallback theme for low-color setups (16 stunning colors, we can even choose which ones!)
  * Make a custom text-mode theme

 = Discussion =
Could using LightDM help with the transitions at all? And would BURG and an elementary theme for it be of use? -- aroman
Yes, we might need to coordinate with LightDM to provide smoother transitions. It's important to keep close contact between the devs of LightDM and Plymouth themes. Messing with BURG is too dangerous IMHO, at least in Luna where we have lots of other custom stuff in the boot process. In addition, BURG currently breaks Plymouth. --shnatsel
When we will have a greeter, it should be multilingual. I could help with that. --gotwig

We may take a look at the plymouth and boot modifications jolicloud made: http://jolicloud.github.com/jolios/docs/core-modifications.html -- Paspartout
Oh, looks interesting. Thanks a lot for the link! --shnatsel

--

This is going to change for Luna +1 with the system compositor work and lightDM from boot. For now, we should just implement a simple plymouth theme and concentrate on a more fleshed out design for Luna +1 --DanRabbit

There's hardly any hope for seeing system compositor materialize in 12.10, so I guess we still need this. The current plan is a black screen for normal splash. There are two special cases for you to design: filesystem check notification and LiveCD boot. --shnatsel

Here's a crappy video mockup http://youtu.be/lMzMnKCaNnE --DanRabbit
Another one: http://youtu.be/0JSLEIr6phI

Plymouth transition proposals: http://min.us/miek3ggLr --shnatsel

Okay, those greeter transitions don't work, because the wallpaper takes a while to load. Often the initial transition happens on a black screen instead of wallpaper. So here's a very rough mockup which works well with that: http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1337376513.png Imagine background fade-in :) --shnatsel

Another Plymouth concept: http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1340443304.jpg
Sorry for low quality. --shnatsel
- I like that one. --gotwig
-I (poorly) animated that concept a while ago, could some AFX wizard give it a shot?
Here's the rendered MP4 (probably should speed it up around some large curves):
http://cl.ly/MOPM/final.mp4
(you should probably save and open that in movie player, web browser players sometimes fail)
Here's the source file:
http://cl.ly/MO07/animated.aep
Obviously, the animation should be faster and more "natural".
-ainq

When on an SSD you see the Plymouth boot screen for maybe a second or two, would we want something simple and short? It seems broken when it doesn't finish the animation. --Mars11

What we have right now is probably acceptable for beta1. Retargeting to beta2 :) --DanRabbit

Work items:
Rebrand Ubuntu plymouth theme: DONE
Implement boot logo animation: INPROGRESS
Implement shutdown logo animation: DONE
Implement text animation: TODO
Implement 4-bit color support: TODO