Verbose startup and shutdown screens in Ubuntu

A number of people have complained that the current (Ubuntu 7.04) startup and shutdown screens lack the information that they had in earlier releases. Enabling the display of startup and shutdown messages is fairly simple and can be useful in diagnosing system problems. Here’s how to do it.

The first thing you need to do is open a shell. Then you’ll need to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst. This can be accomplished with the command sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst. Then locate the line # defoptions=quiet splash and change it to # defoptions=splash, by removing the word quiet. Then save and exit (Ctrl+O, Ctrl+X in nano). Then to make the change take effect type sudo update-grub. This will set all boot menu items to show a splash screen with messages on both startup and shutdown. The change will take effect the next time the computer is started.