What is verbose mode?

[shustudent]

I'm using Mandrake 10.1(well I will be properly when i can connect to the internet, i've posted a thread in the Linux Networking if anyone can help) and when it boots up it displays a screen saying something like:

System booting up. Press Esc for verbose mode.

I was just curious what is verbose mode? I didn't want to just press Esc and find out, as I'm still finding my feet with Linux and don't want to do anything that may confuse me and/or my computer.

[budman7]

Pressing ESC for verbose might help you with your networking problem.
when you bring up verbose mode in that context you will see everything that your computer is doing on bootup.

Verbose mode in other contexts does the same thing, it displays exactly what is going on.

[soulbrothax831]

If you hit escape for "verbose mode", it will just show you what is loading and starting up. It's a good tool to see if something you configured to boot during startup worked or not.

[shustudent]

Cheers guys, I was curious. If verbose mode lists all the things that's going on (which has to be useful) is there some way that you can tell Linux to always boot up in verbose mode?

Or is it really not worth the bother?

[budman7]

I am not sure, but I think once you activate it, if you want to go back to silent, you will have to activate silent mode.

But having it in verbose mode will not slow down the boot process.

[Ethyriel]

There should be a kernel parameter in your /boot/grub/menu.lst that starts gensplash (the kernel patch that provides the graphical background) in silent mode. If you post the contents of that file here, we can help you default to verbose mode. But beware, there may be something in your distribution's initscripts that cause problems in verbose, but it's usually the other way around.

If Mandrake uses bootsplash still (rather than gensplash), I'm a little worse off. Is there a /etc/splash or /etc/bootsplash directory?

[shustudent]

There's a /etc/bootsplash