Setting Fedora 10 to boot to command prompt i.e. run level 3
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
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I found another option to boot up in verbose mode. Just press Esc during boot, pressing Esc again returns you back to graphical.
Also replacing ‘rhgb quite’ with ‘verbose vga=792’ also is working for me in FC10.
It displays all messages in 1024×768 resolution mode.
I’m going to try that. Thanks for the tip!
This page was a great help!
I followed your tip and edited the “/boot/grub/grub.conf” file and replaced the boot param ‘rhgb quite’ with ‘verbose vga=792′ and it does work as expected.
My laptop now displays all messages in 1024×768 resolution mode.
Thanks