Installing Plymouth

[mashley]

I want to display a static image, nothing fancy, while my pi running Arch is booting. I'm trying to get Plymouth to work but I'm struggling. I've followed the instructions in the ArchWiki, but I've got stuck at the part where I'm told to run mkinitcpio -p linux as I receive an error saying "Preset not found: '/etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset'"

Unsurprisingly when I rebooted, nothing happened other than my normal boot sequence. If anyone has any ideas how I can get this working I would be most grateful.

[moonman]

There is no initrd in arch, however you can make your own and edit config.txt to load it

[mashley]

Ahh ok, thanks. I'll look into how to add an initrd. Is the warning about no modules being loaded a problem, or can I ignore it?

[moonman]

Because there is no initrd, there is no preset for it so you need to create initrd manually

[mashley]

Thank you for your reply. I did as suggested and made an initrd, ignoring the warning that no modules had been added as I don't really know which ones are needed! I made the changes needed to config.txt and cmdline.txt, and rebooted. When the pi started back up, the root filesystem was read only, and no splash screen was displayed

[moonman]

Add your rootfs to fstab with appropriate options to mount it rw. No modules are needed in initrd, kernel already all the required modules built in. As for the splashscreen i can't really tell you what's wrong, never tried it myself.

[mashley]

Thanks moonman! One last question, do I need to specify the kernel on the command line when I build the initrd image?

[T4d3o]

Hello, I can tell you as I did with plymouth-lite
You must download, apply patches and compile it here http://svn.stmlabs.com/listing.php?repn ... 6bbff4d48c

Download files for systemd from here https://github.com/embedded-webruntime/plymouth-lite

You need to change plymouth-lite-start.service to this $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'ExecStart=/usr/bin/echo 0 > /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/cursor_blink ; /usr/bin/echo 0 > /sys/devices/virtual/graphics/fbcon/cursor_blink ; /usr/bin/chvt 7 ; /usr/bin/ply-image')

Now modify /usr/lib/initcpio/init to this on line 35 (aprox) only add ply-image line
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'if [ -n "$earlymodules$MODULES" ]; then
modprobe -qab ${earlymodules//,/ } $MODULES
fi

ply-image /usr/share/plymouth/3.png &> /dev/null

run_hookfunctions 'run_hook' 'hook' $HOOKS')

Now modify /etc/mkinitcpio.conf to this
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '# BINARIES
# This setting includes any additional binaries a given user may
# wish into the CPIO image. This is run last, so it may be used to
# override the actual binaries included by a given hook
# BINARIES are dependency parsed, so you may safely ignore libraries
BINARIES="ply-image"

# FILES
# This setting is similar to BINARIES above, however, files are added
# as-is and are not parsed in any way. This is useful for config files.
FILES="/usr/share/plymouth/3.png"')

Now run $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'mkinitcpio -g /boot/initrd -v')

Now /boot/config.txt $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '#initramfs
initramfs initrd 0x00f00000')

And finally /boot/cmdline.txt $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'initrd=0x00f00000 quiet logo.nologo vt.cur_default=1')

I think that's all, sorry for my bad English

EDIT: of course you need to add the service, to that $this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'systemctl enable plymouth-lite-start')

[mashley]

Thank you T4d3o! I'm having trouble downloading the plymouth-lite source from the first link you posted. There don't seem to be any download links on the page, and if I try checking out using the URL you provided in SVN I just get errors that there is no repository at the URL. How did you download the needed files?

[T4d3o]

https://github.com/embedded-webruntime/ ... master.zip

Apply only the patches tha you can see in the first url.