Hello everyone! I've found an challenging mockup a while ago: a boot splash that changes depending on the time of day. You can see the original mockup at <a href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/mock-up-intelligent-ambient-boot-splash/">http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/mock-up-intelligent-ambient-boot-splash/</a> The concept seemed interesting, so I decided to work on a proof-of-concept implementation. There were two approaches to this task: writing a custom plugin and using script plugin with an external script which passes all the needed info via --update call. I chose the latter because writing a custom plugin is too inflexible and looks like reinventing the wheel; an external shell script is plugin- and them-independent and rather flexible. I've made some progress and have an implementation of <a href="http://www.pilipe.com.ar/content/plymouth-greeting-message-mockup">http://www.pilipe.com.ar/content/plymouth-greeting-message-mockup</a> to show off the potential of such scripts, you can get the code at <a href="https://launchpad.net/plymouth-greeter">https://launchpad.net/plymouth-greeter</a>. But my implementation turned out to be inflexible, too. In the beginning I focused on making the thing work and didn't think that the external script should be theme-specific - some themes may change with time of year, show disk usage, etc. but my script wasn't. Arose a need in creating a standard of defining the script to execute (probably a line in .plymouth file of the theme - but how exactly to do that?). Moreover, in my implementation the external script launched not by Plymouth, but by Upstart (or worse - sysvinit). It makes synchronizing the splash and the script extremely difficult because of some Upstart features and limitations, I spent 80% of coding time on Upstart and race condition workarounds and the script is still not launched on boot in many cases because of lots of tech details about Upstart and its scripts (at least in its scripts in Ubuntu). I can workaround that, but the code will become completely ugly and hack-ish. I think interaction with the rest of the system adds numerous new possibilities to Plymouth themes. While it can be easily added to custom plugins (I haven't tried myself, but it should be so), it's unavailable to users of the popular script plugin. So I propose adding the possibility of running an external command on showing the splash to script plugin and developing the standard of defining the command to be run. Any corrections, thoughts, suggestions? Respectfully, -- Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff