Comment 3 for bug 587079

As suggested in 543506, the following does appear to work. Have had to do this on 20 machines destined for site, as we're under some pressure to have them delivered:

for file in /etc/init/*.conf; do sed -i 's/^console output/\#console output/' $file; done
sed -i 's/start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=lo/start on filesystem and started rsyslog and net-device-up IFACE=lo/' /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf

sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="init='\''\/sbin\/init --verbose'\''"/' /etc/default/grub
update-grub

Numerous reboots seem to show that it's working ok; prior to this we would end up with an undefined run level as reported by the 'runlevel' command, and our rc2 scripts wouldn't execute.