No verbose output on ubuntu-server

[Ricardo Duarte]

Binary package hint: upstart

Release:
    Ubuntu Server 10.04
    Minimal Virtual Machine installation
    No plymouth is installed (this is by default)

Version
    0.6.5-5

What you expected to happen:
   When the system boots, result from init scripts should be visible on the screen. That way, it is easy to know at boot time if some service failed to boot

What happened instead:
   Only a black screen is shown
   The caret is shown on screen bl'inking and moving vertically. Maybe the output from init scripts is there, but masked in back characters
   The first login prompt is at the middle/bottom of the screen

[Ricardo Duarte (rjtd21)]

Boot result on ubuntu-server (minimal)

[Ricardo Duarte (rjtd21)]

It looks like the text is being printed with black foreground on a black background.
The final position of the login prompt is lower if I run more scripts on boot.

[Micheal Waltz (ecliptik)]

Same problem here. Removed plymout,h but upon boot it's strangely quiet. We have a custom script that runs from /etc/init.d/ that normally is quite noisy about what's it's doing, but with 10.04 it boots to login without a peep, even though the script is running in the background.

I understand having quiet boot is good for desktops and splash screens, but for ubuntu-server it would be nice to have it by default do a traditional sequential init script boot. Is there an upstart option for sequential and verbose booting?

I realize we could re-write the script to work with upstart, but the documentation for this doesn't seem finished and I haven't had much luck finding good examples online. Not to mention the amount of time and resources needed to re-write tried and true init.d scripts.

[Steve Atwell (satwell)]

Debugging boot-time issues has been more frustrating and difficult because of upstart job output going to /dev/null by default. I've been able to accomplish a lot by adding "console output" to upstart jobs (particularly rc-sysinit and rc) so that I can see what's going on, but having to hand-edit these files is less than ideal.

A nice feature would be that ability to pass a flag on the kernel commandline that would make init default to the output console type. This way we could easily turn output from upstart jobs on and off when we want.