Show Me the Boot Info!
For crusty old systems administrators (such as yours truly), the modern Linux boot sequence can be a touch annoying. I mean, the graphical boot system is pretty and all, but, I absolutely hate having to continually click on buttons just to see the boot details. And, while I know that some Linux distributions give you the option of viewing the boot details by either disabling the graphical boot system completely (i.e., nuke out the "rhgb" option from your grub.conf's kernel line) or switching to an alternate virtual console configured to show boot messages, that's just kind of a suck solution. Besides, if your default Linux build is like the one my company uses, you don't even have the alternate VCs as an option.
Now, this is a RedHat-centric blog, since that's what we use at my place of work (we've a few devices that use embedded SuSE, but, I probably void the service agreement any time I directly access the shell on those!). So, my "solution" is going to be expressed in terms of RedHat (and, by extension, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Fedora and a few others). For many things in RedHat, they give you nifty files in /etc/sysconfig that allow you to customize behaviors. So, I'd made the silly assumption that there'd be an /etc/sysconfig/rhgb type of file. No such luck. So, I dug around in the init scripts (grep -li is great for this, by the way) to see if there were any mentions of tt>rhgb. There was. Well, there was mention of rhgb-client in /etc/init.d/functions.
Unfortunately, even though our standard build seems to include manual pages for every installed component, I couldn't find a manual page for rhgb-client (or an infodoc, for that matter). The best I was able to find was a /usr/share/doc/rhgb-${VERSION}/HOW_IT_WORKS file (I'm assuming that ${VERSION} is consistent with the version of the RHGB RPM installed - it seemed to be). While an interesting read, it's not exactly the best, most exhaustive document I've ever read. It's about what you'd expect from a typical README file, I guess. Still, it didn't display what, if any, arguments that the rhgb-client would take.
Not wanting to do anything too calamitous, I called `rhgb-client --help` as a non-privileged user. I was gladdened to see that it didn't give me one of those annoying "you must be root to run this command" errors. It also gave some usage details:
rhgb-client --help Usage: rhgb-client [OPTION...] -u, --update=STRING Update a service's status -d, --details=STRING Show the details page (yes/no). -p, --ping See if the server is alive -q, --quit Tells the server to quit -s, --sysinit Inform the server that we've finished rc.sysinit Help options: -?, --help Show this help message --usage Display brief usage message
I'd hoped that since /etc/init.d/functions had shown an "--update" argument, it might take other arguments (and, correctly, assumed one would be "--help"). So, I used the above and updated my /etc/init.d/functions script and added "--details=yes" and rebooted. Lo and behold: I get the graphical boot session but get to see all the detailed boot messages, too! Hurrah.
Still, it seemed odd that, since the RHGB components are (sorta) configurable, there wasn't a file in /etc/sysconfig to set the requisite options. I hate having to hack config files that are likely to get overwritten the next time the associated RPM gets updated. I also figure that I can't be the only person out there that wants the graphical boot system and details. So, why havent the RHGB maintainers fixed this (and, yes, I realize that Linux is a community thing and I'm free to contribute fixes to it - I'd just hoped that someone like RedHat or SuSE would have had enough complaints from commercial UNIX converts to have already done it for me)? Oh well, one of these days, I suppose.