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Note: I do not accept any credit for any of the section that I have sourced from others in any of my tutorials.
I have only included the information as extracts for the purpose of simplicity, and to hopefully assist others from the lengthy "Googling" I had to do to collect the information I used to solve my issues, and as in most cases I was having lots of problems trying to access some of these websites for various reasons,
(ie: site no longer available, not stable, corrupted links, etc), or just plagued with various issues in general.

So I thought it would make more sense to hold this information in one place..

If there are any objections or issues with having this as part of the tutorials, I will gladly remove it.
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This applied for me running "Linux Mint 13"

I had issues getting the plymouth themes to work on my laptop.

I have a HP DV5-1007tx Pavilion laptop with a 1GB NVIDIA graphics card. 
My laptop's resolution is set at 1280x800 @24 bit colour.

After installing Mint 13 with the Mate desktop, I tried to add some themes, you know, eye candy...!  But found out very quickly that there was not to be any success.  I googled for a few days and found lots of solutions but none that worked for me, here are the ones I tried.

The first and foremost thing I did was to make sure I had my nvidia driver installed correctly and working, so I followed this guide and all worked like a dream.

How to get Nvidia's proprietary driver to work

So with this all working i went on hunt to see why these themes would not work, so I I first started here in this Mint Community group with these links...

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/37

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=111527

All of these are good suggestions and they might work for most , but unfortunately they did not for me,
so I then went on to these links...

https://launchpad.net/~mefrio-g/+archive/plymouthmanager

http://askubuntu.com/questions/99651/apt-get-warning-no-support-for-locale-en-us-utf8

and followed there suggestions, but they too did not work, even though I know that my video card can do higher resolutions than 1280x800@24, I was running out of ideas.

Since all had failed me I gave up and decided to return back to the original splash/startup screen that was installed by default, using the "Startup Manager Gui App".

If you don't have this installed you can install it using the standard package manager application, search "startup manager".

Then through the menu find the application...

menu ->
              administration ->
                                           startup manager.

Here are some screen dumps, of what it looks like on my system.

(Note: it runs as superuser)

Originally the resolution was set to 1024x768@24bits

 

So I thought if I cant get the themes working there was no need for the resolution to be set at 1024x768, so I changed it to 800x600, as you can see in the next image.

 

I went into the "advanced" tab and set that to 1024x768, this is only my preference, you can leave it at 800x600.

 

Once I had completed this and clicked on the "close" button, it went off and re-compiled what it needed to do, and then I rebooted the system.

Guess what happened at the boot up...?  the theme I had selected and had been trying to work, actually came alive and started to work..

I thought, you have got to be sh....ing me, after weeks of google'ing and trying a lot of things, I never thought to check what the theme's resolutions and design was set for, so....

The moral of my story is check the obvious, and be aware that regardless of the fact that your video card can do high resolutions, depending on the laptop, most around the start of the dual cores was usually 1280x800.

 

I hope this helps anyone else that runs into the same problem I did.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this.