The new graphical boot splash for Linux is a program call Plymouth. It provides feature like kernel mode graphics, flicker free boot messages, full boot logging, and… animation. The install is pretty simply, as the root user do the following:
yum -y install plymouth-theme-*
plymouth-set-default-theme –list (to see a list of all installed plymouth themes)
plymouth-set-default-theme nameOfMyTheme -R
Of particular note is that the -R is different from earlier installs of plymouth that required you run the command plymouth-rebuild-initrd. Most tutorials online list the old way of rebuilding plymouth and following them will leave you with an unchanged system.
One of the nice features of plymouth is that the boot splash is loaded before the actual boot process when the initial RAM disk image is being loaded. This means you get the pretty boot image while you are doing things like entering your hard drive decryption pass phrase.