57

Every time my laptop boots, I am greeted by several "Ubuntu 13.10 has experienced an internal error" dialogs once the graphical desktop environment (whatever it's called) is displayed. Apparently the problem originates from plymouthd, which is (unsurprisingly) the daemon of the Plymouth boot splash application.

Has anyone ever found a fix for this type of issue?

(I would provide log excerpts but I'm not sure where to find them.)

Seth
  • 58,122
Stan
  • 735
  • 1
  • 5
  • 7

5 Answers5

42

I have experienced the same error when I first installed Ubuntu 13.10 on the toshiba harman/kardon this week.

I solved the error with a single command:
Open a Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type:

sudo chown -R $USER: /lib/plymouth

Then all the permission issues are solved and the error is gone in the next boot.

Zanna
  • 70,465
user247355
  • 452
  • 5
  • 2
  • 7
    Is 'user:user' supposed to my my user name? Or ...? As it stands the answer does not make sense to me. Thanks. – Art Swri Jul 18 '14 at 14:44
  • @ArtSwri user:user is actually user:group like mustafa:sudo, but in Ubuntu, when you create a user at setup or somewhere else, it usually creates a same group with your username and makes it your primary group. so if your user name is mustafa it should be mustafa:mustafa – Mustafa Aug 15 '14 at 18:40
  • 4
    This solution doesn't look very clean. What to do if the computer is multi-user? – bli Aug 18 '14 at 16:36
  • Isn't hardman/kardon an audio company? LOL – braden Sep 10 '14 at 14:51
  • 4
    Possible solution : sudo chmod 755 -R /lib/plymouth – Marko Feb 20 '15 at 21:26
  • 6
    It didn't actually worked for my multi-user system. I removed plymouth. To do that, open /etc/default/grub as root, and change line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quite splash", to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="verbose " – Marko Feb 20 '15 at 22:20
  • 2
    I used chown -R <myusername>:<myusername> /lib/plymouth. It worked for me. – imuneer Feb 24 '15 at 05:33
  • Thank you so much! I tried this a few months ago and it worked. Sorry I'm so late in accepting this as the answer. – Stan Aug 16 '15 at 18:39
  • 2
    Does anyone have any idea why this would work? It hints the problem is due to access control. But I've forbidden non-root user to execute /sbin/plymouthd by chmod o-x /sbin/plymouthd. So only root can run it then there should be no problem access /lib/plymouth. – Tianren Liu Feb 24 '16 at 03:44
  • @TianrenLiu: You are right, it is weird. Could it be something like this: /sbin/plymouthd contains some invalid setting which cases the crash. If it is not owned by root then it is not used at all and default values are used, hence no crash. – Lii Apr 17 '16 at 09:43
  • 3
    This directory does not exist. – Zelphir Kaltstahl Feb 07 '17 at 21:21
  • Doesn't work on Xubuntu 15.04. – smwikipedia Apr 28 '17 at 08:15
  • Doesn't work neither on Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 ; folder doesn't exist. – Michaël Polla May 11 '17 at 22:30
  • 2
    I'm running 16.04, updated as of the date of this post and the problem recurred. Simply changing ownership on the /lib/plymouth tree, as suggested here did not solve the problem, I also needed to run sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/lib/plymouth – ezekiel68 Aug 01 '17 at 04:01
  • On Ubuntu 17.04 Gnome I used sudo chown -R : /sbin/plymouthd without specifying user nor group and that worked. – 29axe Sep 01 '17 at 13:26
  • @29axe From man chown: "If only a colon is given, ... neither the owner nor the group is changed." – muru Feb 26 '18 at 02:03
30
sudo apt-get install plymouth-x11

That did help me with the issue.

Isengo
  • 518
8

A possible solution not mentioned here is to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure Plymouth

From: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-gnome-default-settings/+bug/1536771

Sarke
  • 341
3

I was experiencing this problem, also. I found out that /lib/plymouth did not exist. I installed plymouth using Synaptic (but you can use whatever pkg installer you like), and it fixed the problem.

There are other plymouth packages, but it looked like they were already installed for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 64 bit, which is what I am using. I also discovered that when I installed Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 32 bit, I didn't have this problem. For me, it was only a problem with the 64 bit install.

Eliah Kagan
  • 117,780
Pete
  • 31
  • 2
2

In my case (Ubuntu Gnome 17.04), when I looked at the error details, it said the error was that /var/log/boot.log didn't exist. I just did 'sudo touch /var/log/boot.log' and the error went away.

hornetjockey
  • 21