Does dmesg do that?  I usually use it after I've booted up my laptop to see if
the pcmcia package correctly identified my NIC.

> >   5) Watch the messages that the kernel prints when it's booting.
> >      Remember that Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown may be used to
> >      scroll the console messages (by a limited amount anyway).
> >      Often there are valuable clues regarding what's going wrong
> >      in these messages.
> 
> Speaking of which, does anybody know how to get those buffers to be more
> persistent? I want to be able to switch to another console or to X and
> then back and still be able to scroll through the buffers. Once logged in
> one could take care of this via screen, but it'd specifically be
> neato-keen to be able to scroll through the startup messages :). It'd also
> be nice to be able to extend them, especially if that gets us firmware
> stuff...