help needed to enable boot.log in Hardy Heron

[Derek Broughton]

Robert Holtzman wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, David Armour wrote:
> 
>> I've since read that Crtl-S/Q may control the rate of start-up messages,
>> and/or that Crtl-Alt-F8 makes them viewable in that console. HTH.
> 
> Can you cite a source for this, please?

Sheesh.  Ctrl-S/Q is just the most basic TTY technology.  Look up any
30-year old teletype manual (that's why our consoles have names
like /dev/tty*). But if you really need a citation, I said it here, last
week.

Ctrl-alt-F8 is a little more obscure, but it's where I find all the boot
messages - and again, I said it here, last week.  How the messages come to
be on F8 is still unclear to me, and I don't think it's guaranteed.  I tend
to just cycle through all the TTYs.

>> /var/log/boot,
>> for example is similarly empty, presumably because /boot/init.d/bootlogd
>> shows BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=No.
> 
> My /boot (on 8.04) contains no init.d. Instead, /etc/init.d contains:
> 
> case "$BOOTLOGD_ENABLE" in
>    [Nn]*)
>  exit 0
>  ;;
> esac
> 
> Which to me is unintelligible

I'm not sure why that matters, but for the record, it means _somewhere_ a
file was sourced defining BOOTLOGD_ENABLE, so if it has any of the values
that equate to "N", exit.

>> So, to sum up: Diagnosing/troubleshooting boot errors conveniently
>> largely depends on getting a bootlog which in turn means enabling
>> bootlogd... but the bootlog daemon has a bug, or is otherwise dis-abled
>> in Hardy?
> 
> Or the Ubuntu developers are more concerned with making the distro Grandma
> friendly and forgetting the poor schmucks that actually have to *gulp*
> diagnose a problem.

I get so tired of reading unique problems and hearing users claim that it
makes Ubuntu useless for everybody.  Maybe, just maybe, they actually
understand the need for diagnostics (especially considering how much crap
gets dumped to .xsession_errors every time you login).

>> As a workaround to these circumstances, you may try:
>>    Crtl-S/Q,
>>    Crtl-Alt-F8, or
>>    modify a bootscript to 'tee' output to a user-created file...
> 
> Again, sources please. Thanks.

Why?  Is there any way that these options can be destructive?  You're
essentially refusing to take the advice you're given, and then complaining
that the Ubuntu developers ignore our needs.  If you try what's been
suggested and _still_ can't find the messages, then there's a problem, but
I don't think you're looking hard enough.
-- 
derek