Plymouth splash screen is the animated screen you see after the grub (or grub2) menu in many popular Linux distros. And since the plymouth screen is a cool thing to play around, many linux users have created their own plymouth artworks. The Splash screen category in Gnome-look.org is one of the best places on the net for you to look for new, beautiful Plymouth splash screens to replace the default one of your distro.

Normally, to view your splash screen, you will have to reboot your computer. However the author of khattam.info has written a shell script to allow you to preview the plymouth splash screen without rebooting your computer.

Here is the exact script from khattam.info:

 #!/bin/bash  
 ## Preview Plymouth Splash ##  
 ##   by _khAttAm_    ##  
 ##  www.khattam.info   ##  
 ##  License: GPL v3   ##  
 chk_root () {  
  if [ ! $( id -u ) -eq 0 ]; then  
   echo Must be run as root  
   exit  
  fi  
 }  
 chk_root  
 DURATION=$1  
 if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then  
      DURATION=5  
 fi  
 plymouthd; plymouth --show-splash ; for ((I=0; I<$DURATION; I++)); do plymouth --update=test$I ; sleep 1; done; plymouth quit  

To use this script to preview the plymouth screen, you have to install plymouth-X11 first. In Ubuntu and other similar Debian based distro, the installing command is:

 sudo apt-get install plymouth-x11  

After installing plymouth-X11, copy-paste the script above into a text file, give it a name, save it and make it executable. For example, I gave the script the name ply.sh and save it in my home folder, the command to make the script executable will be:

 sudo chmod +x ply.sh  

After that, all you need to do is to open the terminal and execute the script as root:

 sudo ./ply.sh  

And here what it looks when I run the script in SolusOS 1.1 (the plymouth screen of SolusOS 1.1 is a modified version of the Solar plymouth screen):

SolusOS 1.1 splash screen in preview

The preview will last for 5 seconds if you use the above script. To make the preview run longer, you just need to change the duration time in the line "Duration=5" into another number.

If you are interested in plymouth screens, here are some videos of nice plymouth screens I found on youtube:

Arch Linux Sunrise plymouth

Natty Narwhal plymouth