Hope this saves someone else some trouble: After compiling a custom kernel, the boot screen is all blurry... but then after X loads all is back to normal. This is caused by adding framebuffer support into the kernel. Anyway, the fix is as follows: Tell Grub to use the framebuffer corectly. In my situation, I added the Nvidia framebuffer(nvidiafb), and I prefer 1024x768 resolution so I modified the file /boot/grub/menu.lst as follows: title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-custom2 root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-custom2 root=/dev/hda2 ro quiet splash video=nvidiafb:mtrr,ywrap vga=0x318 initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-custom2 savedefault boot
All I did was append the following to the line which says "kernel": video=nvidiafb:mtrr,ywrap vga=0x318