As a user of the proprietary (closed source) Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) the ugly boot splash screen had been bothering me for some time. For sure, I don’t look at it for a long time, two seconds at most, before GDM is loaded. But I do see it often when I start up my computer, every day on average, so even though it isn’t a serious problem, it’s quite annoying. As far as I can recall there was some limitation in the proprietary drivers which prevented the boot splash screen from appearing with all it’s eye candy in high resolution, and you were given an ugly low resolution version. Since I upgraded to Lucid to Maverick (10.10) I noticed this had not changed. I decided to fire up Google to figure out why this was still not fixed, and I encountered a blog post which I can recommend to anyone using the proprietary Nvidia or AMD graphics drivers. The blog post provides a script which fixes it automatically, all you have to is choose the right display resolution. I haven’t been able to figure out why this hasn’t been fixed out of the box yet in Ubuntu as it should be, but I like this fix. Noteworthy is that it also applies the resolution (I could choose 1680×1050, the native resolution of my monitor) to Grub2, so it’s font size is no longer so huge.
Another serious annoyance are the window buttons which were no longer located on the right but on the left in Lucid. That was decided by the Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, Ubuntu’s boss Mark Shuttleworth himself, for the benefit of innovation in the future concerning the contents of the window title bar. Whatever they intend to do, it’s easy to change it back, as described in this blog post.