The Ubuntu development team has decided to change the plans and not include Plymouth technology for Ubuntu 9.10, which means they will keep the current USplash system. The purpose of this change is to improve the current boot time (35 seconds on a normal hard drive and less than 20 seconds on a disk SSD) to less than 10 seconds in any disk. Other features to be included in Ubuntu 9.10 are:- Kernel 2.6.31- Default EXT4 File System- And include Gnome Shell in the universe repository.[via ubuntulife