RHEL6 - disable the tiered-progress bar during boot

Question

How do you get RHEL6 to display the "traditional" display of startup information instead of the tiered/stacked progress bar?

The standard info dump is displayed during shutdown.

Answer 1

plymouth-set-default-plugin text
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

or, remove "rhgb quiet" from the Grub configuration (/boot/grub/menu.lst).

Answer 2

The program that shows you the fancy loading screen is called Plymouth.
See if you can find it with checkconfig --list, and disabled the service if needed.

If that isn't the cause, it's probably the "quiet" option in Grub. Disable it by removing the word quiet from the boot options in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Answer 3

If you boot in text mode which is how most servers would be set up you have to do still more. In text mode, plymouth paints a colorful text bar which is difficult to completely remove. It's NOT in chkconfig. Here's how.

1) Remove rhgb and quiet from the "kernel" line(s) in /boot/grub/grub.conf

2) Remove or comment out the splashimage and hiddenmenu options.

3) Type plymouth-set-default-theme details

4) Type /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

5) Restart and see if it works.

On the bright side the boot time messages are all saved in /var/spool/plymouth/boot.log and /var/log/boot.log.

When I think about it a little more, I realized that since I'm usually not in front of the server's screen anyway, the plymouth system is not a terrible thing. However, when I'm debugging startup problems when I am in front of the server's screen, plymouth is a nuisance that should have been made easier to remove.