Save Lono

Fedora 10 uses a new grapical boot loader named plymouth.  Supposedly it is much faster than the old rhgb(redhat graphical bootloader).  Espcially if you have a Radeon grahpics card.  Plymouth employ’s the use of kernel-mode driver setting’s passed from grub.conf file. This feature may let you enjoy a fast high resolution grapical boot.  If you have the right grapics card.  Specifically a Radeon R500 or higher…  …sweet.  Now the 35% of users that bought a Radeon over Nvidia can enjoy a quicker boot.  Thank you RedHat.  Thank you.

Annoyingly if you don’t have a decent Radeon card the system boots in an ugly 640×480 resolution, but that’s no worse than rhgb in the last release.  Booting to an X login screen may be nice for the casual user, but I prefer watching my services start at boot.  So naturaly the first thing I do after a new installation is edit my ‘/etc/inittab’ to boot to a command prompt (runlevel 3).  The numeral highlighted in red is the run level Linux will boot to by default.  Also known as the ‘default run level’.  🙂

example:

# inittab is only used by upstart for the default runlevel.
#
# ADDING OTHER CONFIGURATION HERE WILL HAVE NO EFFECT ON YOUR SYSTEM.
#
# System initialization is started by /etc/event.d/rcS
#
# Individual runlevels are started by /etc/event.d/rc[0-6]
#
# Ctrl-Alt-Delete is handled by /etc/event.d/control-alt-delete
#
# Terminal gettys (tty[1-6]) are handled by /etc/event.d/tty[1-6] and
# /etc/event.d/serial
#
# For information on how to write upstart event handlers, or how
# upstart works, see init(8), initctl(8), and events(5).
#
# Default runlevel. The runlevels used are:
#   0 – halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#   1 – Single user mode
#   2 – Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
#   3 – Full multiuser mode
#   4 – unused
#   5 – X11
#   6 – reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

So usually this would be good.  Sadly no.  Plymouth will boot in graphical mode anyway until all your services are loaded then kill the X session to a command prompt.  But there is a silver lining in all this… if you have a great Radeon card you can watch in high resolution the stunning blue background and progress bar until it dumps you to a prompt!

So after much googling I found Fedora’s Doc’s(sorta), well it was more like a basic run down of Plymouth.  The Doc said that if you delete the ‘rhgb’ as a kernel option in the grub.conf plymouth will boot without hiding the run level status.  Below is an example of the ‘/boot/grub/grub.conf’ without the rhgb kernel option.

grub.conf example:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroupmattcom1/LogVol00
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=1
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/VolGroupmattcom1/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.i686.img

Delete ‘rhgb’ save and reboot.  Good luck with Fedora 10.  It is not as polished as some other previous releases but I’m working through it.

-Matt