Hi,

Is there a way to switch off all boot messages after I have configured slackware the way I want it to be?

I have appended quiet when kernel boots as well as disable the echoes in rc.S and rc.M. I am looking for a way to remove the very first boot message after bios load. i.e. "Loading Linux.... blah blah blah, Bios check successful...

Is that even possible?

I think your best bet is to look into one of the kernel patches other distributions use to produce a splash screen, and then display a black splash screen until boot is complete. Though, to be honest, I don't know if those suppress the earliest kernel messages or not.

Loading linux... comes from the bootloader. BIOS check successful... comes from the BIOS.

Funny question. I remember having used Ubuntu 10.04 on a server for a brief period of time. I had some trouble debugging the centralized authentication setup, because all the boot messages were missing, and there seemed to be no way to turn them back on. I complained about this and filed a bug report, but was told by the developers that this was a feature, not a bug, since "nowadays nobody uses boot messages anymore". Well, I haven't used Ubuntu anymore since that day. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my boot messages and find them quite useful.

Cheers,

Niki

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I'm with you on this Niki: boot messages are essential diagnostics when things go wrong, and reassurance that the boot is still progressing when things are going right. I really don't get the "OMG! Must hide messages" mentality.

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it's just to make my system look the way i want it to i guess taking away the prints does not take away the logging? i can always refer to dmesg should there be a need to troubleshoot something. and i'm not running a server, so in a way, it's less critical for me if something goes wrong.

i have tried ubuntu and i do not like the way it's customized (too windows-like if i can put it that way). Slackware is much more open and stable from what i've experienced.

+1 on keeping boot messages, but I get wanting to customize your rig, and yes, it's not such an issue if you're not running a server. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but I don't know what it is.

After looking through lilo manual, it seems like there's no quick way to suppress the messages w/o some kinda internal hack to lilo.

Quoted from man lilo

Have you considered using grub instead of lilo? Probably easier to do with grub.

I did some investigation on lilo source and found these in the second stage boot loader code (in nasm unfortunately.. something i'm not familiar with )

I suppose by changing the above strings to null and recompiling lilo will hide most of the messages, except for "............" but not a very clean approach i feel.

I did gave Grub a thought, but I think I still prefer the simplicity of lilo :-p thanks for the suggestion though.

Seems like a lot of hard work for very marginal returns....

I agree wholeheartedly. On multiple occasions I managed to diagnose hardware problems relatively fast because I could see (and take a photo of) the boot screen. And while the aesthetics of bootstrapping are subjective, I also think the way it looks is far superior to nothing, or any kind of progress bar. Just as in pretty much every other respect, Slackware defaults to the most simple, fail-safe, informative, and educational way to do the task at hand.

It's possible. How much are you willing to modify? You would need to modify the lilo ("Loading xyz Bios check successful"), kernel ("early console, decompressing elf") and sysvinit ("INIT: version 2.88 booting") sources slightly. To me, the changes are trivial but of course these are all important parts of the system. Other options may be more appropriate.

I think it's fine if you want a silent boot. You can always just have a second non-silent boot option if you do need to see kernel messages.

Yes, bottom line.

Add the "compact" option to /etc/lilo.conf and that will fly by...

As for the splash screens - no idea.

Fiddling with the scripts diagnostic output is not the correct way. Redirect it to the serial port instead using console= on the kernel command line, so your VGA console stays quiet.

Of course, don't use LILO, but a different boot loader.

With the right configuration (including KMS) you can have a seamless transition from the boot loader splash screen to the X login. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fbsplash

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