How do I disable the "attractive," graphical startup screen?
 

Personally, I think that the graphical boot up mode for Mandrake is ugly as sin. How do I get rid of it? I only want text when I boot.

You want to edit your /etc/inittab file. Open it up in your favorite text editor, find the sections that deals with the default runlevels. You'll see a line like id:5:initdefault:. Change the 5 to a 3 and the next time you boot, it should show you nothing but text.

You'll have to edit your /etc/inittab file.

Look for...Change the "id:5:initdefault:" to "id:3:initdefault:". You'll then boot to the command line, and can start X with startx.

Guys, you've got it wrong. He means the framebuffer thing, between Lilo and the login stage, when it lists services starting [ OK ] etc.

i dont' know if i am misunderstanding or hangdog, but i thought you were referring to something along the lines of: this

I did that, and it got rid of the X Window startup.

However, I'm still left with the "Loading BlahBlahBlah.............................................OK" screen on that ugly Mandrake graphic .

Thanks! :)

Uuh, crap, spoke too soon.

I managed to kill the lilo graphic, but the "loading" screen is still there. Ok, so I killed the X graphical boot and the lilo graphic. 2/3 is progress, right?

How do I kill the loading screen?

Turn off the monitor?

The only thing I can think of would be to go through your start up scripts and comment out all the echo lines.

Thanks Proud and DrOzz, I didn't even know you could mess with the lilo display. But that's why I hang out here, the amount I learn just from reading posts is incredible.

I'm quite sure it's called the framebuffer, as if you Ctrl+Alt+F2 you can see it's not used on that mingetty, only the first of the default 6. Also iirc it has something to do with the vga= line.

Edit: also see this new feature, soon to be introduced to the linux kernel. :)

when is that going in the kernel?

Dear god! WHY!?!?! What a waste of perfectly good code.

bootsplash can actually be really useful, don't knock it till you see it's applications. and there is no kernel overhead, just a little extra memory usage.

so yeah the mandrake bootup screen DOES use bootsplash. When i used to use mandrake, what I did was to take the kernel config from the annoying config file there and just recompiled a stock kernel without the boot patches on it. Also though it will presumably be using an initial ramdisk (initrd) which actually contains the graphic data, so if you were to remove the reference to the initrd file then the image shouldn't appear.

You should see the new one for RC1 :cool:

I'm not really keen on criticising a distro who have official representation, but man rc1 stank something awful. so so poor....