Ubuntu – How to make boot output verbose

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I use to enjoy watching my red hat then debian then ubuntu machine boot, the boot process was not hidden from my view, now it is, in most of all distros, now, I know I can somehow connect a terminal to a serial port and "see" the boot process, but I'm not sure what happens after the GUI starts, also pressing the ESC key during boot in ubuntu shows some info, what I'm looking for, no big deal if I have to setup another computer just for the task, is to vew all the stderr or whatever the name for that is, like a constantly refreshed dmesg command. is that possible? if so, can I have it in a "stay on top" terminal (which btw I know how to setup)

Best Answer

There are two parts in this. One is the grub part which is hidden by the boot screen. You can enable its output for textual consummation by changing the line GRUB_CMD_LINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub on Ubuntu machines and remove quiet splash:

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

run update-grub after this for it to take effect.

This will give you text mode message until X takes over you screen. You can change that as well but then you would have to start X by hand. If I want to see those messages hidden by X, I change to the console with Ctrl+Alt+F7 (on Mint, Ubuntu might be different).

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