Since the release of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora 12, fedora is using plymouth. Plymouth kicks in just after grub and before the Xserver starts.

Description:

Plymouth provides an attractive graphical <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/bootsplash" title="Bootsplash" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootsplash">boot animation in
place of the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/text_messaging" title="Text messaging" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging">text messages that normally get shown.  Text
messages are instead redirected to a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/data_logger" title="Data logger" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_logger">log file for viewing
after boot.

Plymouth does support themes and there are couple of plymouth themes already in the repos:

plymouth-theme-spinfinity-0.8.2-3.fc13.i686
plymouth-system-theme-0.8.2-3.fc13.i686
plymouth-theme-charge-0.8.2-3.fc13.i686
plymouth-theme-fade-in-0.8.2-3.fc13.i686
plymouth-theme-solar-0.8.2-3.fc13.i686

To use one of these you need to do the following and see the effects after a reboot:

sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme
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