In attempting to solve some problems I need to capture the console output on bootup. These are messages that evidently don't make it into dmesg or any other log file I can find. I'm guessing these are kernel messages that occur before dmesg and other logs are started? Since they flash by fast I can only see that they are colored, like warnings and errors. Searching dmesg does not find them all. One has to do with fstab.

In researching the use of bootlogd I came upon this previous thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...otlogd-918962/

The upshot of that thread is that CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS needs to be enabled in the kernel.

Well, I don't want to compile a kernel (at this time), and evidently bootlogd is no longer used (much)?

So, what is the current, modern way to capture bootup messages? Is there some other program that has replaced bootlogd? Or?

Running LMDE with recent kernel (3.2 something).

Thanks,
Keith Ostertag

LM has disabled a lot of logging by default. But I like to be able to read /var/log/messages

Basically, you need to edit /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf

This post has the easy way to reenable message logging (don't worry that it refers to ubuntu 11.04, the principles are the same for LMDE).

Hi- Thanks for the suggestion. I looked that webpage over, and that's not my problem- my /etc/rsyslog.conf does not have /var/log/messages commented out.

I think I need to better learn the various log files, and how to use grep better.

I later found some of the messages I was looking for in /var/log/kern.log, some in /var/log/apt/term, etc, for instance.

Keith Ostertag

Early boot messages are usually available via dmesg.

You can also slow down the messages by adding the following option to your kernel command line
where N = msecs delay between each console message.