From TTY to Plymouth: Adding a Graphical Boot to Gentoo OpenRC
The graphical-boot follow-up to ep 84. We installed Gentoo from stage3 in
ep 83, put XFCE on top in ep 84, and today we close the loop: GRUB →
Plymouth splash → LightDM → XFCE, with no TTY ever visible. Pure graphical
boot path on OpenRC. No systemd.
Also covered: installing Google Chrome as a binary package — the first
time this build has touched a precompiled binary instead of an emerge-from-
source. If you've been told "Gentoo can't run binary packages," this is the
chapter that proves otherwise.
Recorded live. The dbus USE-flag rebuild (chapter 17:36) is the part every
"install LightDM" video skips — you cannot start LightDM until dbus has X
and elogind USE flags on, and that means rebuilding world. We compile it on
camera. Same with the Plymouth font issue inside chapter 31:36 that requires
/etc/dracut.conf.d/10-i18n.conf with i18n_vars pointing at the keymap files.
Both fixes are real Gentoo wiki landmines and both are resolved live.
Hardware: same libvirt/QEMU VM as ep 83/84 — 10 logical cores, 32GB RAM,
BTRFS root, distribution kernel.
Previous episodes:
ep 83 — I Installed Gentoo From Scratch (the install)
ep 84 — Building a Gentoo Desktop From Scratch (XFCE on OpenRC)
Both pinned in the channel.
Reference docs used in the stream:
Gentoo wiki: LightDM — https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/LightDM
Gentoo wiki: Plymouth — https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Plymouth
Gentoo wiki: Dracut — https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dracut
Gentoo wiki: Google Chrome - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Google_C...
Chapters:
00:00 Boot up & install Google Chrome (first binary package on Gentoo)
11:36 Display manager primer: GDM vs SDDM vs LightDM
13:06 Installing LightDM and the display-manager-init script
17:36 First reboot fails — dbus needs X and elogind USE flags
29:51 LightDM works end-to-end (graphical login → XFCE)
31:36 Installing Plymouth + the OpenRC plugin (~amd64 keyword)
40:06 GRUB quiet splash, GFX 1920x1080, GFXPAYLOAD=keep
43:36 Browsing Plymouth themes — picking solar
49:06 The graphical-boot reveal (GRUB → Plymouth → LightDM → XFCE)
51:36 Wrap-up