What is the right term for each visible bit of the startup sequence

[SecretCode]

So we're all pretty familiar with what starting up a Kubuntu system looks like ... and more so if you've been doing lots of installs and reinstalls recently.

But I'm not sure what is the right or best term for each stage. Any answers?

1. The BIOS (or UEFI? or other?) power-on screen which is entirely up to the firmware, and is text-based but can be hidden by a splash-screen / logo
2. (Ignore for now the possibility of a firmware-specific boot device menu.)
3. The GRUB2 menu (or GRUB or LILO in ye olden dayes) - text-based - can be skipped depending on GRUB2 parameters
4. Then ... a Kubuntu logo nicely pulsating ... if your graphics driver supports it; plain "Kubuntu nn.nn . . . ." text otherwise. All this only if the boot entry includes "splash", otherwise pages and pages of scrolling boot messages
5. The graphical KDE login screen ... what's this? Is this KDM/LightDM/etc?
6. The fancy KDE startup animation with the disk drive and the screen and the etc. What is this called?
7. And finally your desktop.

Is one of these Plymouth? Is Plymouth just one of several options for one of the stages?

I count at least 3 different things there that could be called splash screens.

(I'm only asking about the visual stages, not about MBR and inits/runlevels/upstart/etc.)

[anika200]

Lets see hmmm,
Bios splash > Grub splash > Plymouth splash > Display Manager (kdm, lightdm, etc) splash > KDE startup splash > Desktop

Some of these splash screens may be turned off so you may or may not see them all.