Verbose boot log

inkbug

Hi guys. Sorry if this was answered already somewhere - I couldn't find the solution myself:

I recently introduced a friend to Solus as her first linux distro.

She was alarmed, when booting after a Friday update, that the machine's splash screen (Lenovo, in this case) appeared frozen while showing no progress, before the login screen appeared.

I wondered how one can cause the boot loader to show what it is doing during boot.

Looking up man clr-boot-manager , I see there is an option to set the debug level to "1" or "2", which should do the trick, but I'm not sure how to set this.

Could anyone point me in the direction of the documentation I need?

I'd rather not break my system through uninformed trial and error - any help would be appreciated.

brent

inkbug

inkbug the boot loader to show what it is doing during boot.

like a bootloader plymouth? this would be a real-time boot log you see when you boot up?

I read the man too. Couldn't see it.

I DDG'd this for a while but nada…someone knows hang in there

johano

inkbug

I believe, in the startup menu (if you system boots without first showing you the menu, keep tapping space—or just press and hold space may work—until you see the menu) the active kernel will be highlighted as your boot choice. If you now press E and it will allow you to edit the start-up command line for this boot. Remove the option --quiet and press Enter, that should show the messages as the boot-up goes through it's sequence.

It's a while since I did this, but pretty sure that's the sequence to show boot messages on-screen as you go (not sure if plymouth will override that if installed, I don't have it installed)

inkbug

Thanks brent !

It's good to know I didn't miss something obvious 🙂

brent

I don't know if its doable to install plymouth and tweak it (man? --help?) to reflect heavier/meatier boot action output..seems like a longshot except it seems every square inch of linux was made to tweak..

anyone else out there?

what's a tool that would mirror what the bootloader is doing during bootup?

unless that only lives in a log?

still flailing 🙂

inkbug

Thanks johano !

I tested this on my home Solus system: I didn't see the double dash in the line, but I deleted the quiet option and hit enter.
Unfortunately, it looked like the boot became stuck at this point.

A couple of ctrl+alt+deletes later boot resumed normally.

At no point did I see the scrolling log I would expect during boot.

Thanks for your suggestion, though 🙏

nolan

those are kernel parameter.
see this to change them, there should be noplash and remove quiet, (this method is "permanent" though, meaning it persist between reboots)
The temporal option is to edit the kernel parameters wen the boot menu shows up, see this, in there you should see an option to edit parameters.
hope it helps.