Changes in booting with ubuntu-server 10.04

[Michael Waltz]

After trying out the alpha and beta releases of Ubuntu I am finding that 
the booting method of 10.04 is greatly altered. I understand why there 
were made, to improve the boot time and make it look nicer, but they 
seem to contrast with how a server should boot.

With a traditional unix-like startup a server administrator expects to 
see what exactly is booting on the system and if there are any failures 
or warnings. It seems that this is not the case in 10.04 so far. When I 
first installed Alpha 3, grub automatically booted to the first OS 
listing without even listing the menu (I understand you can use ESC to 
go into the menu) and then plymouth took over displaying a splash screen 
until the login prompt without showing any boot information.

Are there plans for the 10.04 server version to keep with a traditional 
server start-up? Or is this the default we should expect upon install? 
I've changed a few things, such as enabling the grub menu with a 5 
second timeout, removing plymouth on install, but there are still a few 
bits that make booting seem odd. The first is that the systems boots by 
default to tty7, displaying a blank screen like it's expecting X to 
start up. The second is I'm unable to find a way to have upstart display 
any information about what init or init.d scripts are running.

There are a few bug reports on these items, but they're not necessarily 
"bugs" it seems since this is how the desktop flavor is suppose to work.

With 10.04 server can we expect a traditional server boot or are 
individual admins going to have to enable these extra bits of verbosity 
manually?

-- 
Micheal Waltz
SMG Unix Infrastructure
Qualcomm Inc.
Phone: 858-845-6083
Cell: 858-882-7079