ubuntu gui question

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Josh Coffman wrote:
> On 10/3/07, betty <nicepenguin at webcanine.com> wrote:
> > one thing i really like about RH gui is that when it starts up or shuts
> > down it shows a list of the processes....
> > on ubuntu, it doesn't do that. anyone use the ubuntu gui and know how i
> > can get to see the processes that are opening or closing?
> not sure about ubuntu, but other distros (fedora for instance) allow
> you to see details with ALT+D during the splash screen.
>
> also, i think there is a grub or kernel option for silent mode...
> --silent, i think, been a while since I played with that.

I am not precisely sure what Betty is describing here.  There's a project 
called "bootsplash" that's been around for a while that uses the framebuffer 
and a RAMdisk to display pretty icons with fancy colors in response to 
various daemons and other events starting.  There are a bunch of different 
themes available, and Fedora/whoever have made their own themes.  For a 
while, SuSE had the normal text console wrapped up in a green+white frame 
with chameleons on it on tty1.  I think if you want to stop bootsplash from 
happening, you'd do your distro's equivalent of "rc-update del bootsplash 
default".  That's "update-rc.d bootsplash stop 2 3 4 5" on Debian-based 
distros IIRC.

The default non-bootsplash display is a bunch of ASCII, sometimes with colors.  
Like so:

Welcome to Blue Hat Linux 9.6 ("Fuzzy Penguin" release)
Press "I" for interactive setup.
Entering runlevel "sysinit".
Mounting proc at /proc ... done!
Mounting sysfs at /sys ... done!
[[ repeat ad nauseam ]]

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