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.