How do you monitor startup messages in Ubuntu?

Chris Rees utisoft at googlemail.com
Fri Jun 20 23:51:48 UTC 2008


> 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.
>

This is NOT a secret handshake at all, it's the standard way to switch
terminals. If one knows enough to read the startup messages, s/he
should be able to remember a simple combination. I'm sure your users
can remember Ctrl-Alt-Del, and Ctrl-Alt-Bksp, right?



> 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.


Or

3) ssh into their computer, and run dmesg. Or get them to run dmesg | lpr

If a user doesn't get that much, chances are they won't even give you
the right error.

Or

4) Add an entry to menu.lst, which would do exactly what Fedora does;
make it identical to the original line, but add nosplash, and call it
diagnostic or something.


Chris




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