On Feb 21, 6:22am, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > > 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...
>
> 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.
Yeah. dmesg is usually used by one of the startup scripts
(/etc/rc.d/rc.sysint on my RHL7 box) to save the boot messages to one
of the log files.
With regard to being able to persistently scroll the startup messages
as they appeared in a virtual console though, it was my impression
that these messages were stored in video memory (at least for the
scrolling part anyway). As soon as you switch to X (or possibly)
other virtual consoles that wipes it out.
Even though the boot messages (though not the firmware messages, alas)
do end up in a log file, it is still useful to be able to scroll the
screen, particularly in those cases when your system won't completely
boot...
Kevin
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