Plymouth

Plymouth Graphical boot animation (splash) and logger developed by Redhat.

Preparation
The ebuild is present in Portage. Install it with following command:

Alternative way is to add aidecoe's experimental overlay if you'd like to use live ebuild:

Be sure to choose appropriate graphics drivers.

Live ebuild supports libkms which abstracts vmwgfx, intel and nouveau (no radeon support yet).

Above command should pull also required.

To hide splash automatically when xdm starts and show on shutdown, you need to add plymouth to default runlevel:

To work properly with init system, we need to edit either (baselayout-1) or  (OpenRC) and disable interactive feature. For OpenRC it's:

rc_interactive="NO"

Configuration
To lists available themes invoke:

and to choose e.g. solar:

Initramfs generation
To generate initramfs for currently running kernel just invoke:

It will create your initramfs in. Where $KV is your kernel version.

Adjust your file similarly to:

kernel /path/to/kernel root=/dev/sda1 video=radeon:1280x1024 quiet splash initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.34-gentoo-r1.img

If you don't have modesetting enabled by default in your kernel, you might need to do it by appending .modeset=1 to kernel command line if the driver supports it, otherwise you could still use uvesafb.

You're ready to reboot. You should see chosen splash already on shutdown.

Update
You should update your initramfs on every plymouth update:

With -f dracut will overwrite existing initramfs.

Virtual testing environment
You can easily run different plymouth themes and test custom dracut modules in a virtual machine. I have set up a routine to create an ISO to boot off, this should work pretty much with any virtualizer out there, I used VirtualBox.

This setup is based on Grub2 (1.99_rc1) for bootloading. Grub2 is still experimental in Portage and you need to ** keyword it.

You need app-cdr/cdrtools for mkisofs.

Make sure you compile Framebuffer:Uvesafb into the kernel you're going to boot your VM with. Don't forget to include v86d's initramfs in kernel or use dracut to do it. Or just find some kernel on the interwebs that already has it.

Let's set up a grub menuentry:

Copy your kernel:

Copy your dracut-created initramfs:

Some Grub2 magic:

It's ISO-time:

Assign dracut.iso as your virtualizer boot device media and profit!

Whenever you to change something, like plymouth theme, just put this stuff into shell-script and run it.