Boot and log in without fallback to text console

Question

This is something I have noticed happening for a long time now, and I see it in various flavours of Ubuntu. At the moment I happen to be using Ubuntu Studio.

As the system boots past grub, you get a nice graphical Ubuntu Studio animated logo for a while, but then, just before the login screen appears, it drops back to the text console, where you see various things at different times (like system startup logging - as you'd see if you pressed escape while Plymouth is displaying the logo, and even a login prompt at times), but typically it at least shows the filesystem status (as clean usually), then it switches back to graphical mode for the login dialog.

It would look very much neater if it didn't flash the text console on screen like this. I am just wondering why it does this, and would like a fix? I know it's no biggy. I just get curious about odd things :)

Answer 1

You will always get a black screen between Plymouth and Login, unless you are using Windows 10. For myself in Ubuntu 16.04 it lasts about four seconds. In Ubuntu 18.04 it only lasts 1 or 2 seconds. You can however eliminate all text that appears on that screen.

There are a number of different things you can do for a smoother boot experience:

1. Reduce console messages
2. Reduce screen resetting
3. Eliminate Grub messages
4. Reduce fsck during boot

_{I've purchased a tripod for my cellphone to make videos of the various grub booting scenarios but have run into technical difficulties creating GIF to post here.}

1. Reduce console messages

Based on Arch Linux's Silent Boot article you can add three extra options after quiet splash boot parameters:

quiet splash loglevel=0 vga=current udev.log-priority=3

The full article references systemd in boot in which case this can be used:

quiet loglevel=3 rd.systemd.show_status=auto rd.udev.log_priority=3

• Also touch ~/.hushlogin to remove the Last login message.

2. Reduce screen resetting

From this Q&A: What is vt.handoff=7 parameter in grub.cfg? it says:

For a smooth boot process, we want to display something other than a black screen as early as possible and leave it on screen until the desktop is ready. vt.handoff=7 is part of this. We have the boot loader display an aubergine background (we wanted to have an Ubuntu logo as well, but there are problems with different aspect ratios between the boot loader and the real system, so this is the next best thing). vt.handoff=7 then causes the kernel to maintain the current contents of video memory on virtual terminal 7, which is a new "transparent" VT type. The first time that the kernel is told to switch away from VT 7, either from Plymouth or manually (Alt-F1, etc.), these contents are lost and VT 7 reverts to text mode.

If you are grub with a graphics background image add these lines in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_GFXMODE="1920x1080x32"
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="keep"

3. Eliminate Grub messages

After selecting a menu option, or the countdown timer expires grub sometimes issues these messages:

Loading Linux %s ..." ${version}
Loading initial ramdisk ...

To eliminate these message edit /etc/grub.d/10_linux and change these lines to comments:

# June 29, 2018 hide Loading Linux message
#  if [ x"$quiet_boot" = x0 ] || [ x"$type" != xsimple ]; then
#    message="$(gettext_printf "Loading Linux %s ..." ${version})"
#    sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/" << EOF
#   echo    '$(echo "$message" | grub_quote)'
#EOF
#  fi

And a page down these lines too:

# June 29, 2018 hide Loading inital ramdisk message
#    if [ x"$quiet_boot" = x0 ] || [ x"$type" != xsimple ]; then
#      message="$(gettext_printf "Loading initial ramdisk ...")"
#      sed "s/^/$submenu_indentation/" << EOF
#   echo    '$(echo "$message" | grub_quote)'
#EOF
#    fi

4. Reduce fsck during boot

In your /etc/fstab ensure passno is set to 0 to prevent systemd-fsck@.service from running. More details from the manpage.

Change the frequency of fsck to every 30 boots or once a month: My Ubuntu is running fsck on every bootup