Comment 6 for bug 886946

I agree with LStranger, it is changes like this that make me sour on the Ubuntus. Change the default display manager, sure, change the default VTY, fine, but don't reduce configurability with each release -- if I wanted a *NIX like that I'd be running OS X.

Complaining aside, this appears to be a problem with the integration of Plymouth.

Grub has the vt.handoff parameter which allows the user to specify which virtual console the bootsplash and such are expected to run on. The plymouthd program takes a --tty option that allows it to run on a virtual console specified by the user.

The Plymouth upstart job in /etc/init/plymouth.conf allows the tty parameter to be set (e.g. --tty /dev/vcs9), but according to the header of the file (and to the results of experimentation) this conf file is not used at boot -- Plymouth is started from initramfs.

This means that it might be possible to change the VTY by rebuilding the initrd, but I haven't tried that (yet ... waiting for the next XOrg Intel video driver crash, which happens about every 10 days).

In regards to KDM, it has a config file which allows it to be run on a specified virtual console -- but these options are ignored if Plymouth passes it a virtual console to open on (I forget the mechanism -- has_vty or somesuch).

Suggestions for fixing:

a) A configuration file for plymouth that is used in the initrd and allows options to plymouthd to be set

b) Have initrd respect the vt.handoff option instead of hard-coding the virtual terminal