Why is plymouthd crashing on startup?

I have experienced the same error when I first installed Ubuntu 13.10 on the toshiba harman/kardon this week.

I solved the error with a single command:
Open a Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type:

sudo chown -R $USER: /lib/plymouth

Then all the permission issues are solved and the error is gone in the next boot.

sudo apt-get install plymouth-x11 

That did help me with the issue.

A possible solution not mentioned here is to run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure Plymouth

From: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-gnome-default-settings/+bug/1536771

I was experiencing this problem, also. I found out that /lib/plymouth did not exist. I installed plymouth using Synaptic (but you can use whatever pkg installer you like), and it fixed the problem.

There are other plymouth packages, but it looked like they were already installed for Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 64 bit, which is what I am using. I also discovered that when I installed Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 32 bit, I didn't have this problem. For me, it was only a problem with the 64 bit install.

In my case (Ubuntu Gnome 17.04), when I looked at the error details, it said the error was that /var/log/boot.log didn't exist. I just did 'sudo touch /var/log/boot.log' and the error went away.