Enable graphical plymouth boot in Fedora 16 with nvidia drivers

Installation of nvidia drivers under Fedora is well documented. (See http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752). In previous versions of Fedora, enabling the plymouth graphical boot was quite easy. All one had to do was to add the following kernel arguments to grub.conf.

rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset vga=ask

Starting from release 16, Fedora uses Grub2 as the bootloader. The unfortunate side effect of this change is that the vga parameter is now obsolete. I absolutely hate the ugly text based boot screen - but going back to the nouveau driver was not an option. (Simply because I am stubborn like a mule). So after a lot of tinkering, here's how I managed to get back the graphical boot screen.

DISCLAIMER: Modifying Grub configuration files could make your system unbootable. Proceed at your own risk.

1. Find the video modes supported by the vbe driver. To do this, press "c" at the grub menu to launch the grub console and run the following commands:
   

   set pager=1
   insmod vbe
   vbeinfo
   

   
   vbeinfo command will list all the accessible video modes it finds. Choose one that you like. Eg. 1280x800x24. Press ESC to exit the console and hit ENTER to boot the OS.
   
   
2. Create a Grub2 font. I chose the excellent DejaVu font as the example here. Feel free to choose a different font in it's place.
   

   sudo grub2-mkfont --output=/boot/grub2/DejaVuSansMono.pf2 --size=24 /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

   
   
3. Edit /etc/default/grub and add the following lines to the end
   

   GRUB_VIDEO_BACKEND="vbe"
   GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"
   GRUB_FONT_PATH="/boot/grub2/DejaVuSansMono.pf2"
   GRUB_GFXMODE="1280x800x24"
   

   
   replace GRUB_FONT_PATH with the correct filename of the font you generated in the previous step. GRUB_GFXMODE should be the mode you chose from the output of the vbeinfo command.
   
   
4. Backup /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and regenerate it using the new settings.
   

   sudo cp /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.bkp
   sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

   
   
5. Reboot and enjoy the graphics.