How do you monitor startup messages in Ubuntu?

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Alan Milnes wrote:
>
>> Jeffrey Tooker wrote:
>>> email under this thread that said <Cont><Alt><F1> for startup messages.
>>> I did this and the messages came up. Is there a command to incorporate
>>> <Cont><Alt><F1> into system bootup? I would much rather have messages
>>> than a progress bar.
>>>
>> sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
>>
>> remove quiet and splash wherever you see it.
>
> or just remove splash.  "quiet", as one would expect, reduces but doesn't
> completely eliminate messages.  With quiet, you'll see progress messages,
> without it you'll see a pretty complete list of the things that are
> happening.
> --
> derek
>

Thanks for your feedback, but I think the answers are off the mark.
So far, the best option is to edit menu.lst so that all startup
messages show all the time to all users.  That's a bit ugly, but there
are compromises in life.

Its not a very good solution for people who don't want to read startup
messages, however.  In a computer lab setting (with Fedora, at least),
I can lock down grub, the bios, and users can still come in,
experience problems, and restart and hit the button that says "show
details".  When that happens, they see a failure message when a kernel
module is broken and can say "Hey, PJ, the openafs module is not
loading, can you fix it?"   That way, I get a little free
administrative assistance from the users.

The Ubuntu alternative seems to be either

1) I give everybody permission to act as root so they can edit the
boot menu (either interactively or in /etc/boot/menu.lst), or

2) Teach users a secret handshake, er, combination of secret
keystrokes, to read the error messages.

Honestly, Fedora copies Ubuntu often enough, why can't Ubuntu copy
Fedora on just this one thing. Put a button on the spash to let us
read the output as the modules load and services start.


PJ


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas