How do you pause booting to read messages?

I have one item that has a red asterisk on it but it goes by so fast I can't tell what it is (I glimpsed "DNS" in the line but nothing more).

I turned on boot logging but it isn't in there. I looked at dmesg but it's not in there. I tried "shift + PageUp" but it is at the very end of the boot process and the machine goes to the login window before I can catch it.

Any ideas on this?

SHIFT-PAGEUP works best if the Scroll-Lock button is ON first, if you want to stop a scrolling screen like the boot messages. Just hit scroll lock during the boot, and it should stop the scroll.
With Ubuntu, I'm not certain which run-levels will cause the machine to NOT start X when it finishes booting, but "init 1" after the kernel name on the boot: prompt *may* do it.

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or, as I have found: [Cntrl] + [Alt] + [F8].
this seems to show the last screenful of boot messages before starting X. (On (K)Ubuntu 6.06 your milage may vary, etc.)

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Scroll Lock worked. Looks like Avahi daemon isn't loading.

The message:
Upper/lower case may not be accurate. Now I can look into this. Thanks!

Hmmm.. Perhaps make sure that (if you are actually wanting to use the Avahi daemon) the script which starts the daemon is CHMOD executable? And if there are configuration file(s) for it in /etc or /etc/avahi that it is set up properly.
Look in your /etc/init or /etc/rc.d or /etc/default or similar location, for starters, and make sure the needed files for the Avahi system are present and executable.

i did a search on Avahi and it looks like I probably don't need it since at this time I don't have a lan setup. I have a Win98 business box across the room but haven't connected it to this box. I really don't have any reason to do so. Thanks for your help.

Patrick K,
You'll probably find that the more important kernel startup messages are sent to the file /var/log/messages. Take a look at it. It's a big file, but you'll only need the last 1000 lines or so.
At first, it looks like impenetrable gobbledy-geek-gook, but there is a lot of useful information there about interrupt assignments, memory allocation, how the detection of your hardware was handled, what services were started and, best of all, error messages and warnings.

Take a look now, just so it will look somewhat familiar for when you have to understand it!

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It is a big file and, you're right, it's pretty much gobbledy-geek-gook. Interestingly, the error I spotted on bootup isn't there. It must not be important enough. Thanks for the tip.

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