Problem with Quantal and a KVM

[Tom H]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Sander Smeenk <ssmeenk at freshdot.net> wrote:
> Quoting Jordon Bedwell (jordon at envygeeks.com):
>>>
>>> And framebuffered consoles. I can see *some* value of having larger
>>> terminals than the default 80x24.
>>
>> And this is more constructive than my comments? Jump in and help fix
>> them bugs. Complaining is not any more constructive than what I did,
>
> I should indeed put effort in getting framebuffers working
> out-of-the-box on all my systems. You are totally correct in that
> aspect. But this is not my main pet peeve. As said, i can make
> framebuffers work by specifying a specific vga=xxx parameter that
> does work.
>
> My question boils down to why server installs need all this doohickey.
>
> In my opinion it shouldn't be this hard to get back to what is actually
> going on during boot of a server install. I'm totally pro these gadgets
> in desktop installs, really, but this makes Ubuntu feel 'Windows™®©-y',
> if i may use that word. Stuff happens behind 'the screen' and it makes
> debugging bootproblems unnecessarily hard for sysadmins running Ubuntu
> on serverhardware in colocating environments.

I've just done a manual install of 12.10 to see what a plain, default
install leads to. There's no "splash" or quiet" on either the
"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" or "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX" lines and
plymouth is set to its "text" theme. You might need some tweaks for
some of your boxes either to kill the framebuffer or set it to the
correct resolution or to make the boot more verbose but these settings
both look like sane defaults.

root at localhost:~# cat /etc/default/grub
# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=2
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"
root at localhost:~#
root at localhost:~#
root at localhost:~# ls -l /etc/alternatives/*plymouth*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 53 Jan  4 20:29 /etc/alternatives/text.plymouth
-> /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-text/ubuntu-text.plymouth
root at localhost:~#

Furthermore:

You had said in an earlier post that you used "vga=792 noplymouth
nosplash verbose init_verbose=yes INIT=/sbin/init -v"

You might want to set "GRUB_GFXMODE" and "GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX"
rather than "vga=" because when you use "vga=" grub displays a message
that it's deprecated (IIRC) and since kernel documentation (in
"kernel-parameters.txt") says that it's a boot-loader parameter, the
grub developers might disable it at *some* point.

Having both "noplymouth" and "nosplash" is overkill since they have
the same effect.

"verbose" doesn't do anything. You must mean "--verbose", which is the
same as "-v", "init=/sbin/init --verbose", and "init=/sbin/init -v".

It's not "init_verbose=yes" but "INIT_VERBOSE=yes" because of "console
output; env INIT_VERBOSE" in "/etc/init/rc.conf" and
"/etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf".