Okay, here's the background & specifics:

I've installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 on my Asus EeePC 1005HA and everything ran great, but I was interested in testing-out the next step in Ubuntu's start-up development: Plymouth.

I installed the 2.6.33 (2.6.33-020633rc2-generic) kernel to insure KMS availability--even though KMS has been enabled in the Ubuntu generic kernels since 2.6.29--and changed my sources to the Lucid (10.04) repos, downloaded Plymouth (0.8.0~6) and all the related dependencies, including GDM 2.29.1-0ubuntu9.

To make sure KMS was being used, I added the /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf file suggested here and edited my Grub2 (1.97~beta4-1ubuntu4.1) config file (/etc/default/grub) to allow for resolution set by the "gfxpayload=" setting on the kernel line.

Now, here's where my problem begins. Usplash and Xsplash are successfully removed and boot is, relatively, lightning quick--as compared to the previous Usplash+Xsplash boot time; however, there's no beautiful Plymouth screen. Instead, there's "ugly" text. I personally don't have any problem with a text start... for a very long-time I was anti-graphical start, but my purpose now is to test Plymouth, so I kind of need the graphics to work. Thinking something had to be "messed-up," I ran "sudo hwinfo --framebuffer" and was told the native resolution of the 1005HA (1024x600@60, 16:9) wasn't available. Huh?

So, I shut-down to see if I can make some changes via the Grub menu and--voila--I have a beautiful Plymouth shut-down screen. WTF?

Here is my hypothesis and I'd like feedback to help me debug: the "best" resolution my BIOS supports is 800x600 (24) and X sets the resolution at 1024x600; so, Plymouth tries to load between the BIOS framebuffer and X's. That would explain how I can see the Plymouth screen after X has started (when I shut-down) and not when I'm starting-up.

Does all this make sense? Also, and just to muddy the waters, I have read hwinfo has been known to be wrong. Really?

Thanks, in-advance, for any help you might give and I deeply apologize for the ridiculously long post!

EDIT:
So, I spent (read:wasted) more hours of my life researching this problem and seemed to have made some head-way. I began considering my earlier hypothesis more and wondered if simply putting the i915-kms.conf file in the modules was enough. Read around a bit and found some suggesting of changing the initramfs a bit to make sure the system was using KMS. So, I added two lines to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules: "intel_agp" and "i915 modeset=1." Now, I don't see any text; rather, just a black screen. Now, I see this as a progressive and not regressive move because it now would seem Plymouth is functioning.

Still looking for feedback, though.