View boot messages in Mint 12. Anyone succeeded? Solved ??

[viking777]

I have spent ages trying to get boot messages displayed in Mint 12, and have completely failed. In most distros you can choose to display them or not by pressing 'Esc' but not Mint 12. I have almost lost count of the other things I have tried, but none of them work, the best I have done so far is to get the shutdown messages displayed, but not the boot up ones. A probably incomplete list of the stuff I have tried is this:

Edit GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub - works in Ubuntu certainly, but not Mint 12.

Remove all of the plymouth-theme-* packages from your system,including the text ones. Replaces the boot splash with a flashing cursor, nothing else.

plymouth-set-default-theme - This command no longer exists, it used to work in LMDE, maybe it still does, but not Mint12.

Install plymouth-manager. All it seems to do is substitute one useless boot image for another - waste of space.

update-alternatives --config default.plymouth - told me I had no alternatives - seems like it is right

Install various 'text' based themes. - On its own does nothing except clutter up your hard disk.

Install 'galternatives'. Has no help files, but you can probably work out how to use it (copy your text theme into your default theme folder) but it makes no difference, all you get is a flashing cursor.

Google it - Yeah right! Go on and try. All you will get is people complaining about the problem, you will not get any answers that work.

I have probably missed a few out that I tried hours ago and have forgotten about, but I think you get the idea, I cannot do it which probably means either it can't be done or I have missed something glaringly obvious, but I don't think so this time. If this is some new 'feature' of Mint 12 then I hope it is not one that they will incorporate into any other version of MInt, and certainly not into LMDE which is my main mint distro.

[DrHu]

I don't know about displaying the system as a text console instead of as a graphics login, and assume you have tried that already, if you need to see the boot-up messages before the graphics/desktop starts (x-server)

A good alternative is to simply collect all the boot log
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=49925
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/nat ... onf.5.html
--if the above doesn't work

[viking777]

I don't know about displaying the system as a text console instead of as a graphics login, and assume you have tried that already, if you need to see the boot-up messages before the graphics/desktop starts (x-server)

A good alternative is to simply collect all the boot log
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=49925
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/nat ... onf.5.html
--if the above doesn't work

I haven't actually tried it, but I think you are probably right, if you enable a text login instead of a graphical login you will probably get the boot messages as well, but a console login is not what I want, so it is not a very good solution.

As for reading logs that is not a solution either, simply because I am never going to read them! I am quite happy to look at boot messages during start up and I always do it, but reading log files afterwards? No I am not going to do that. I did try it once (when I had a problem) and this was on a system with boot messages displayed during boot up as well, I turned on the logging so that I could copy the messages down exactly rather than try to remember them. What I found was that the boot log did NOT contain the error messages as displayed during boot up, so basically the whole process was a waste of time, the error messages that I was interested in were not written into the boot log, only displayed on the screen during start up. I have had many people tell me this is impossible, but I assure you it happened.

Appreciate your trying to help though, thanks.

Edit. Actually, your post did help me out a bit, though not in the way you intended. It caused me to look in /var/log for the first time in months, and I found it contained 450 Xorg.0.log files all from the same day . Now I do reboot quite a lot during the course of a day, but restarting X 450 times!! That is beyond even me. They weren't duplicates, they all had a different number in front of them and they weren't .old files either. Anyway I probably saved nearly 100Mb of disk space getting rid of those, so thanks again And btw I ran bleachbit yesterday (as root) and it didn't remove them - shows you how good that is.

[viking777]

Don't you just hate computers?

You can probably tell from my opening post in this thread that yesterday, I spent quite a lot of time trying to get boot messages to show up on Mint 12. Nothing would work.

Today, I boot into MInt 12 and what do I get - boot messages

All that has happened to this machine since yesterday is that it been switched off overnight. I must have rebooted and cold booted about 20 times yesterday and nothing changed, but today it works as I want it to. So the problem is solved then?

Well not really, the trouble is that I tried so many things yesterday without success, that I don't know which of the things I did actually made the difference

So I am really no wiser than I was yesterday, and will probably have to go through the whole torrid procedure again when Mint13 comes out. Actually, I don't hate computers, only Plymouth (and I don't mean the city because that is actually very nice - lots of computer shops in it!)

Oh well, such is life!

[xenopeek]

Drats I had hoped you would crack it and share the solution

[viking777]

Drats I had hoped you would crack it and share the solution

Well, as it is you Vincent, I tried again in my Virtualbox copy of Mint12. Now I don't always trust that what happens in Vbox will be the same as what happens to a full install, but I did manage to get the boot messages to show up (briefly, they don't show for long) with the following.

1) In synaptic remove all packages with the title plymouth-theme-*. This will update initramfs for you which is necessary.
2) Edit /etc/default/grub to this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
3) Sudo update-grub.

It kind of works but not as well as it does in the 'real thing' (for instance I don't get the shutdown messages in Vbox and the start up ones only appear for a couple of seconds) but that is probably just Vbox for you.

[xenopeek]

Allright I've done the edits and about to reboot. Thanks

[MALsPa]

In most distros you can choose to display them or not by pressing 'Esc' but not Mint 12.

Does pressing the down-arrow key work?

[viking777]

In most distros you can choose to display them or not by pressing 'Esc' but not Mint 12.

Does pressing the down-arrow key work?

I don't know, I have got rid of the plymouth splash screen permanently now so it is impossible for me to tell. Actually I read somewhere else that it might be F2 that does it not Esc, but I can't test that either for the same reason.

[soccerz619]

Does this hold true for Mint 11 also, or no?

[viking777]

Does this hold true for Mint 11 also, or no?

I am not sure what you are asking. Not that it matters, because I don't have any version of Mint 11 installed anywhere so I can't answer anyway.

[soccerz619]

I was asking about the method you tried to see the boot messages. They need to add that to the next Mint. But since you don't have 11, no sweat!

[viking777]

This is really astonishing. You note that a few posts back I tried to get the boot messages up in Mint 12 virtualbox. I sort of succeeded, but not fully. I shut down, went out for a couple of hours (sorry ) came back, booted Mint 12 virtualbox and what do you know I have full boot messages available. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened in a fully installed version of MInt 12, it didn't work yesterday, but today, after being shut down overnight, it did. I must be sounding like a crank now, but I assure you this has happened to me twice and it is not because I didn't shut down and try a cold boot previously, I did it for both the installed version of MInt 12 and the Vbox one.

Anyway, if anybody happens to see my sanity roaming around the internet somewhere, could you tar it and email it back.

Thanks.

[psylem]

This is really astonishing. You note that a few posts back I tried to get the boot messages up in Mint 12 virtualbox. I sort of succeeded, but not fully. I shut down, went out for a couple of hours (sorry ) came back, booted Mint 12 virtualbox and what do you know I have full boot messages available. This is EXACTLY the same as what happened in a fully installed version of MInt 12, it didn't work yesterday, but today, after being shut down overnight, it did. I must be sounding like a crank now, but I assure you this has happened to me twice and it is not because I didn't shut down and try a cold boot previously, I did it for both the installed version of MInt 12 and the Vbox one.

Anyway, if anybody happens to see my sanity roaming around the internet somewhere, could you tar it and email it back.

Thanks.

I know how you feel, Plymouth has been nothing but trouble for me too, I've been forced to remove as much as it as I can from 5 systems belonging to myself, friends and family. They all eventually developed intermitten problems during boot (blackscreen and no login gui). Disabling the splah completely and going back to text fixed the problem, it was hell to diagnose though as it only started happening after about 12-18 months of stable operation.

[sswam]

edit the file /etc/default/grub as root

Code: Select all

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

change this line:

Code: Select all

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

then write the file, and run:

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

This seems to work for me. I found this info in a thread on linux questions "How to Disable Plymouth in Mint/Ubuntu". http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-mint-84/how-to-disable-plymouth-in-mint-ubuntu-827422/

There is also the graphical grub boot menu, I didn't try to disable that yet.