How do you monitor startup messages in Ubuntu?

[Jeffrey Tooker]

Steve Lamb wrote:
> On Tue, June 17, 2008 1:22 pm, Karl Larsen wrote:
>   
>>     If you want every detail on bootup at the time of bootup you can get
>> that booting with the rescue boot in Grub just below the one your using.
>> Or if you can wait a minute you can read about it later in a Terminal
>> with $dmesg | more. This tells all.
>>     
>
>     Or just take off the options from grub which supress the output and see
> it as the great unix god, Grok, intended.  LONG LIVE GROK!
>
>   

To All:

I have a small problem with Gutsy when I boot up. Once bios is done the 
screen goes black for a minute or so until the login screen comes up. I 
have the same disk installation in an old 600M Compaq and the Ubuntu 
logo and the progress bar stay on until the login screen comes up. I 
know enough of command line to type it in. Is there a line command to 
bring up either the progress bar or the startup messages? I do not like 
the black screen.

IIRC "grok" is also a verb.

TIA
Jeffrey