My laptop is fairly fast, but I can still reproduce this bug easily enough, by booting it with a DVD in the drive. When the initramfs first runs udev to prior to mounting the root filesystem, it scans all drives including the DVD drive, this involves spinning up the DVD, and my laptop's DVD drive is not very fast to spin up, it apparently exceeds the 15 second window, and usplash drops to text mode.
There are probably also many init scripts that can take longer than 15 seconds between displaying anything. DNS timeouts come to mind. Relying on a 15 second timeout, or any kind of timeout, seems very fragile, and prone to producing very startling behavior to users. -- see shy jo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]