silent boot (no text at all during boot)

[probono]

Hi all,

there are some situations when not one single word should appear on the screen during the boot process.
Instead, all output would be redirected to a logfile and only in case of an error during the boot, the error message would be displayed.

These is a number of reasons why this is useful:

* Public computers. (In appliances/kiosk terminals, I don't want people to see any boot messages at all, they even shouldn't see that we run a flavor of Knoppix.)

* Personal taste. (I don't like colored text messages - looks like in a kindergarten.)

* To allow for esoteric things like video during boot. (Don't laugh: I have a setup that shows a little IBM Linux advertising video clip instead of a boot screen, but the mplayer video gets disturbed by the green hardware detection progress bar.)

(I know that there is the "splash" cheatcode, but even with that some text is on the screen during boot. The splash simply overlays the text. In contrast, the silentboot cheatcode would prevent 100% of text messages from appearing on the screen, if no error happens.)

edit: see below for the solution - it works almost perfect in Knoppix and absolutely perfect in Kanotix.

[veuf]

Very Good Idea!
And good to combine with a splash-screen .. looks more professional.

[user unknown]

A good idea as long as optional, but not a jota professional!

Professional marketing - yes:
Make the user think it's not engineering, but magic.
Hide eventual errors.
Replace kindergarden with cinema

I guess the idea is very good, for those who need or like such a thing.
But I don't accept to call it 'professional'.

In contrast, the windows-booting with progress-bars, and no message showing what's going on is very unprofessional in my eyes - only eyecandy and as such kind of the OS-flavor.

[probono]

It works!

Here is my grub configuration:

kernel (hd0,2)/KNOPPIX/(...) console=tty12 silent quiet splash

This disables all but error messages upon boot. Best of all, you can still see them by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F12. And in KANOTIX BH8, there is also the tux logo disabled by default. Looks great and is exactly what I wanted. (I use it with my personalized splash.sh script).

probono

[veuf]

So how can this be used with knoppix 3.X. Will this be integrated in the next version?

[probono]

So how can this be used with knoppix 3.X. Will this be integrated in the next version?

Try adding console=tty12 to your cheat codes.

Greetings,
probono