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I'd like to be able to disable the Ubuntu splash screen that I see on boot with the indicator meter of progress, and replace that with a text-only readout of the boot up process (such as you can get by hitting the esc key during the splash screen). Is this possible?

I am not asking to disable X and get to text-only login, I"m asking how to deactivate the "Ubuntu" loading screen with the dots, so that I can see text output from the boot process - processes being started, kernel messages, etc. When I wrote this question I was not asking how to disable X altogether, only the boot splash screen.

Thomas Ward
  • 78,878

2 Answers2

159

Yes. Edit /etc/default/grub (using sudo nano /etc/default/grub), and remove the "quiet splash" from the Linux command line:

Here's what it looks like by default:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Make it look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

After this run sudo update-grub2

Also from the GRUB menu, if you want to do this temporarily, you can hit E on a line to edit it, then Ctrl+X to boot the kernel line.

Make sure you don't have plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text package installed.

RolandiXor
  • 51,797
-1

So, I couldn't get this to work in Ubuntu 16.10 of 17.04. I used grub-customizer as well as editing the /etc/default/grub file directly (and using update-grub2 after). All the other things I could find had the same answer, remove quiet splash.

As it worked on a 16.04 system, I decided to compare the grub.cfg files and found an entry in the 17.04 grub.cfg file which said "vt.handoff". I found the following entry on this parameter; What is vt.handoff=7 parameter in grub.cfg?

Eventually I edited the grub.cfg file (which you shouldn't do because thats whatts update-grub2 is for, it will generate the grub.cfg file), but this seemed to work!

ps. removing plymooth did nothing on my system, so I added it back in.

user607528
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