Comment 7 for bug 550104

All,

After reading numerous posts on the "ugly purple screen", my fix was the following.

    1) purge all existing nvidia packages (sudo apt-get purge 'nvidia*')
    2) blacklist the free and old proprietary drivers (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=167422)
    3) install the proprietary driver from the nvidia website (ppa repository didn't have nvidia-glx-195)
    4) Edit /etc/default/grub
        a) Add/update GRUB_GFXMODE to the physical screen resolution, GRUB_GFXMODE=1440x900
        b) Add GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1440x900
    5) sudo update-grub2
    6) echo "FRAMEBUFFER=y" | sudo tee
    6) sudo update-initramfs -u

4b was the crucial step. Once I added this to /etc/default/grub, default.plymouth worked.

Most of my answers were found in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1469475.