I've an intel i5-460M and a nvidia GT 425m card, with the latter not in use. I've the same issue: although the splash screen has a background color (blue for Kubuntu), the splash screen is a text-only splash. On my previous installation, I upgraded from Maverick to Natty. In Maverick, the splash screen was working fine, after the upgrade the above problem began to occur. When using the Maverick kernel (2.6.35-28) to boot into Natty, the splash screen works fine. I've looked at the differences between the initrd of maverick and natty, and the only differences were the kernel files (/lib/modules/*). A fresh installation of Natty did not help, the problem still exists. I've compared debug logs (add plymouth:debug as boot option, it will generate a log at /var/log/plymouth-debug.log) of two identical systems running maverick and natty, and the problem is that the intel driver is not loaded or something: The relevant output on maverick is: [./plugin.c] create_backend:creating renderer backend for device /dev/dri/card0 [./plugin.c] load_driver:Attempting to load driver 'i915' Natty shows: [./plugin.c] create_backend:creating renderer backend for device /dev/dri/card0 [./plugin.c] load_driver:Attempting to load driver '(null)' [./plugin.c] load_driver:drmOpen failed [ply-renderer.c] ply_renderer_open:could not open rendering device for plugin /lib/plymouth/renderers/drm.so [./plugin.c] create_backend:creating renderer backend for device /dev/fb0 [./plugin.c] open_device:could not open '/dev/fb0': No such file or directory [ply-renderer.c] ply_renderer_open:could not open rendering device for plugin /lib/plymouth/renderers/frame-buffer.so [./plugin.c] open_device:could not open '/dev/fb0': No such file or directory [ply-renderer.c] ply_renderer_open:could not open rendering device for plugin /lib/plymouth/renderers/vga16fb.so [ply-renderer.c] ply_renderer_open:could not find suitable rendering plugin [main.c] add_default_displays_and_keyboard:could not open renderer /dev/fb [main.c] add_display_and_keyboard_for_terminal:adding display and keyboard for /dev/tty7 Looking in the source code (apt-get source plymouth), the message comes from plymouth-0.8.2/src/plugins/renderers/drm/plugin.c:473. `null` refers to the driver name, and is defined in the line above (472) by calling find_driver_for_device("/dev/dri/card0"). Reasons why that function may return NULL: - /dev/dri/card0 does not exist - /dev/dri/card0 is not a character device (unlikely) - /sys/dev/char/XX:YY/device/driver does not exist (run `stat -c'%t.%T' /dev/dri/card0` to get XX:YY) - The previous link in /sys/... did not point to a valid driver (i915) When booting with the options `quiet splash` options removed, and `nosplash break=top` added (drops to a shell before running local-top scripts like plymouth), I checked some stuff: - cat /proc/modules: no modules seems to be loaded - ls -l /dev/dri/card0: missing AHA! PROBLEM FOUND! Next, I try to load the i915 driver manually: modprobe i915 When done, I pressed Ctrl + D (exit) and w00t: the nice splash screen finally shows up! Now I need to find a way to fix this in a proper way.