Peter Ross writes:
I had a bit of a look around, and /bin/plymouth (formerly unknown to me) is a fancy splash screen during boot that has to be cancelled before X can start (If I understand correctly)
Yep. To my *immense* disgust, as at Ubuntu 10.04 it is a hard dependency of upstart, meaning that you cannot have an Ubuntu system -- even a server! -- without stupid plymouth splash crap installed. #ubuntu-boot assured me that was an oversight and it should be opt-out in 12.04, but I haven't checked yet. You can turn it off (mostly), thought IIRC that causes it to hard-hang if the boot-time fsck returns non-zero, such that you need a live medium to fix it. I can look up my notes if anyone's interested.
I've gooogled it and tried the suggested "disable" commands for this, but it still happens.
Remove "splash" from bootloader options is supposed to stop it, though IIRC what actually happens is that plymouth simply uses a text theme.