Comment 6 for bug 553854

I agree with Jason here... and the WHOLE fault is Canonical's... they should NOT have adopted Plymouth in the first place if they knew this...

"For nVidia and ATI users, the default "nouveau" and "radeon" drivers are Kernel Mode Setting enabled, but do not always
provide 3D capability at the current time. By switching to using the restricted/non-free nvidia-glx or fglrx drivers, you will gain 3D capability at the loss of a high-color splash screen."

That's the problem! And the above temporary fix, apparently invented by idyllic, is a good workaround. People can live with this... as it is much better than that ugly ... thing. Softpedia's tutorial was created for Linux beginners, based on documentation found on Ubuntu forums! See here for example http://ohioloco.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9127493