How do I log or pause the booting process so I can read it?

[KDeb]

Hi, I am posting from Knoppix* right now. Right before the part where the femaie voice announces "Initiating start-up sequence" (forgive me if this isn't correct), a brief message is shown in white. This is the last thing I see at the Linux Penguin screen and it goes too fast to read it.

Also, I've learned the names for the (generic) hardware inside my computer from watching Knoppix boot up. This information could be valuable to me when I try installing other versions of Linux on my PC, like Debian.

So, I figure there might be three ways to do this. Please share the knowledge if you know how to do any of the following, or another way:

Edit. New and Better idea:
Maybe I could run the hardware detection from windows or from within Knoppix itself, but just for testing and nothing else? It would do the same thing it does when starting Knoppix, but only to write that information to a text file. Come to think of it, are there any small programs that do this for free when you aren't sure about the details of your hardware?


1. The first idea was pausing the Penguin screen before Knoppix shows up, and asking the user to continue with 'Y/N,' similar to batch files. I could just read that from there, but this doesn't save anything. You get to see this once it's shut down, but I don't think you see everything. This is not the best solution

2. The second idea would be to somehow save the booting information temporarily, and show it to the user after Knoppix has successfully been started. Maybe it would be put on the desktop when you start Knoppix.

3. My last idea is that maybe this information is already stored somewhere in Knoppix, the same way certain programs save their installation information in log files. But I don't know where the log file for Knoppix would be if there was one.


I'd prefer 2 or 3, because I could save all of them and email them to myself. However, this has one flaw, and that is preventing me from reading the failure logs which are just as valuable as the regular logs. Documenting what happens when Knoppix fails to start would be helpful for me.

So one last question: Is there any possible way to tell Knoppix "Even if the booting fails, store all the booting information in a small text file the hard drive." Probably so I could retrieve that file in Windows, or another Linux? If this is not possible, it's OK.

*Non-Sequitur/Completely off-topic: Knoppix only seems to work when I use either 'screen=800x600,' 'failsafe,' or both. I only tried twice, so I can't tell you which one yet. This is a major part of the reason why I made this topic in the first place.

[marhleet]

if you
alt-ctrl-F1
to the tty screen 1, the last of the boot sequence is there to read

this is actually somewhere in my smoothwall, but that's not knoppix
i looked a bit, can't see anywhere obvious, though there is a few places i think it might ought to be

/var/log
for a start
probably some configuring of
/etc/syslog.conf might help

[turbine]

do a man on dmesg

then try dmesg | more