Removing abstraction from Ubuntu boot process I have been using Linux after almost 5 years and observed that boot process has been almost abstracted. I mean, not much is visible to the user what is going on behind the scenes (Due to splash screens etc). Now, this might be good for the end users but not for the geek :) I want to bring back the verboseness of old times. Here is what I have done: I have been able to get rid of some of it by removing the "splash" and "quiet" parameters from the command line. However, I still cannot see the services being started one by one (like the ones in init.d). I assume its because of init daemon being replaced by upstart. Are there some configs file which I can tweak to bring back the verboseness of what is going on. Also, as soon as the login screen comes, it erases the boot log history. Is there a way to disable that ? Note: I know I can do that by simply switching the distro to Arch or Slackware. But I don't want to do that.

You can pass `--verbose` on the kernel command line (replacing `quiet splash`) to make upstart more verbose. See Upstart debugging.

You can put `console output` in the global configuration file `/etc/init.conf` so that every job has its stdout and stderr connected to the console (by default, they're connected to `/dev/null`). (I'm not sure whether this in fact works; `/etc/init.conf` is not actually documented, I haven't tested if it's read in this way and this thread is not conclusive. Please test and report.) This directive can go into individual jobs' descriptions (`/etc/init/*.conf`) if you want to be selective (some already have it).