Switching to old school startup display

[Draciron]

I just did an update on an Ubuntu 10.4 LTS machine and it wanted to reboot so I did now I can't even get to the console. I think it's hanging up somewhere on the start up but thanks to the Microsoft like tell you nothing display I don't know for sure or what exactly is hanging up. The only thing the system responds too is ctrl alt del to reboot. Can't even ping it or log in via SSH. I already installed the same updates on this machine but luckily did not reboot it yet. I'm willing to bet whatever package broke the other one will break on this one and if I can figure out where it's breaking I can figure out how to fix it. That means seeing it start up not the blank screen I'm getting. Been meaning to find out about this anyway as the graphics thing annoys me to no end. I prefer to see what services error or fail rather than find out weeks later when I thought my back up service was running and it wasn't or that snort never did run or I'm looking through the logs and discover there's a problem that's been going on for weeks that I never noticed until I went through the logs about something else.

So how do you switch to a detailed start up mode?

[oz]

Someone created a quick HowTo for doing that here:

How to verbose boot GRUB2 Ubuntu

That one was written for 9.10 but I believe it should work with 10.04 as well. If it doesn't work, their GRUB2 documentation page might have been updated to get the proper steps:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

[Draciron]

Thanks, that is exactly what I wanted. Used to most distros had a place to click on for details that would bring up the display. I've never understood why people would rather watch something spin around in circles or dots appear on the screen rather than useful information about what has and hasn't started on their machine.

Someone created a quick HowTo for doing that here:

How to verbose boot GRUB2 Ubuntu

That one was written for 9.10 but I believe it should work with 10.04 as well. If it doesn't work, their GRUB2 documentation page might have been updated to get the proper steps:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2