Restoring legacy components

[Liam Proven]

This is probably a stupid question, but hey...

Is it possible to manually re-install components that Ubuntu has
abandoned and moved away from?

E.g., the old splash screen. I don't like Plymouth. On my machines
where it works, there is a long, pregnant pause before it kicks in,
followed by a very short splash screen with 4 dots that tell you
nothing about how far bootup has progressed. I'd like the old one
back, with an actual useful, informative progress bar.

Secondly, HAL. It worked very well for some things. I use certain
machines that worked fine with Ubuntu 8.x and 9.x and don't work any
more. E.g. the MSI Wind All-in-One machines, whose touchscreen worked
fine in 9.04 but doesn't work right any more.

(By the same token, my home server, a Dell PowerEdge 600SC, boots and
runs Ubuntu Server 8.04 fine, but >=9.04 won't boot. You have to
install the old version and then do an in-place upgrade; 9.04, 9.10,
10.04 and 10.10 won't boot. It's a documented problem but nobody seems
to care.

-- 
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