de-uglyfying usplash, replace it with splashy/upower?

[Sander van Loon]

Currently Ubuntu has usplash for displaying graphics during boot.
Unfortunately usplash displays a rather low resolution image, so it
looks like a pixelated mess on my 19" monitor. Besides that, I don't
like the usplash theme because it looks completely different from the
gdm theme, but a different story. While others may think this is a
trivial problem, I think this is highly annoying because every time I
boot up Ubuntu I'm seeing it. And what bothers me even more is that
other distributions can do it right, and that they already have been
doing so for a long time. Compare usplash -
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=469&slide=2 -
with OpenSUSE's beautiful, high res boot splash:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=464&slide=2

I have already done some things to get this under the attention of the
Ubuntu developers. I filed a bug report -
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-artwork/+bug/24937 -
in November 2005, unfortunately nothing was done with the bug report and
it is now collecting dust in Launchpad. I've explained my view on this
issue in more detail in my bug report, so please read that. In the bug
report I was asked to post a message to the ubuntu-art mailing list. I
sent a message -
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2006-April/001012.html -
and got a few reactions, but apparantly no one from the Ubuntu
developers/art team replied.

I'm not posting this to ubuntu-devel to simply get some attention for
this problem, I'm posting because I was thinking that a technical
solution might be necessary to fix this problem.

After some research on the net I've seen screenshots of bootsplash
software which can do so much better than usplash -
http://www.bootsplash.org/ and
http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/gensplash/shots.php - and two of
them, Splashy - http://splashy.alioth.debian.org/wiki/doku.php and a
HOWTO for Ubuntu here http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=41709
- and Upower - http://www.nanofreesoft.org/index.php - seem to be
developed specifically for Debian and Ubuntu.

My question is, why doesn't Ubuntu use splashy or Upower? I have read
that is because it is not compatible with the lower end/older systems,
and usplash is compatible with those, is that correct? What are the
technical details/reasons for this? Is it possible for the next release
Edgy Eft (which is supposed to be bleeding edge, so it would seem
appropriate) to include Upower or splashy, and after detecting if the PC
can handle that, use that instead of usplash? Or would it be possible to
beef up usplash in some way so that it does support high resolutions?