I am getting tired of the boring text interface upon boot prompting the disk encryption password.

Enter Plymouth. It provides bootsplash thru initramfs.

To use Plymouth, I have to leave the familiar genkernel (kindly provided by Gentoo) to embrace Dracut.

Grub change:

  • root=/dev/mapper/root don't work anymore -- I got around this by labeling the rootfs and have root=LABEL=rootfs
  • crypt_root=UUID=<device-uuid> becomes rd.luks.uuid=<device-uuid>
  • root_trim=yes becomes rd.luks.allow-discards

This means I have to change the default grub config. Better have a fallback in case my config don't work. To do this, I decided to "freeze" the current working boot configuration into custom grub entry. Luckily, I left an old kernel just for this. I simply copied an entry from grub.cfg into a new file called custom.cfg under /boot/grub/.

Now that I got that, I edited /etc/default/grub, ran grub-mkconfig, and finally restarted my system.

Turns out root=... option is entirely unnecessary, as grub-mkconfig handles that for me. A little configuration mistake kept me from booting, and the "backup" grub config didn't seem to work for some reason, but it doesn't matter as I managed to boot properly by editing the grub menu.

One of the first thing that I noticed was that the password appears (as asterix) when I type it on prompt.

Time to make it pretty.

I installed breeze-plymouth for the Plasma Breeze theme, and plymouth-openrc-plugin for the boot process.

After running plymouth-set-default-theme breeze-text and rebuilding initramfs with dracut...

ref: