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When I shut down my system or log out the terminal (the one I reach with Ctrl Alt + F7) is sometimes shown before the login screen appears or before the computer is shut down. Is there a way to stop this behavior?

More explicitly the terminal is shown instead of the splash screen. If I logout the terminal is sometimes shown for a second before the login screen appears. Also, sometimes when I shutdown (from within Unity or Gnome) the terminal is shown instead of the splash screen, sometimes for the whole shutdown process or just for a second or two.

I've had this problem throughout 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04 and I've always used the standard Ubuntu variant. I've also noticed this happening on a fresh install of Natty on a friends netbook, so it's not local to my computers.

N.N.
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  • N.N. - Please read my answer to http://askubuntu.com/questions/56613/shutdown-is-always-a-surprise/57012#57012 – Mark Rooney Aug 13 '11 at 23:53
  • @MarkRooney So you suggest installing Super Boot Manager to resolve the issue? – N.N. Aug 14 '11 at 18:16
  • N.N. - I think it's worth a try – Mark Rooney Aug 15 '11 at 11:26
  • @MarkRooney I'm having trouble finding what in the article you link that will help with this issue. – N.N. Aug 15 '11 at 11:31
  • N.N. - I'm assuming you wish to have a graphical screen shown instead of the terminal code at start up and shutdown, if this is the case Super Boot Manager will enable you to configure the Plymouth splash screen. If this is not the case and you just don't want to see the code unfortunately you have no option to disable it - what you are seeing is the boot up of Ubuntu. – Mark Rooney Aug 15 '11 at 11:41
  • @Mark Rooney Plymouth is running. The problem is that sometimes it looses focus so that the terminal is shown. – N.N. Aug 15 '11 at 11:44

1 Answers1

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The screen you see is because the xorg server is being shut down and reloaded (in the case of logging off) and shut down for good in the case of shutting down. there isn't really any technical problem, it's just how the system works at the moment.

Perhaps it will improve with wayland.

Martin Owens -doctormo-
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  • Thanks for your answer. So it's by design within the restriction of xorg server? Another thing, as I've indicated in the question and in comments, it does not always happen that the terminal is shown so I don't understand why the system would just work that way in some cases while not in others. Just trying to understand this issue. – N.N. Sep 18 '11 at 12:18
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    It's a timing issue, imagine you have 15 threads that do different things and you're asking each of them to shutdown or restart to perform some action. Each might be delayed each time by different things and so you see different visualisations because the order in which they were able to shut down is different. – Martin Owens -doctormo- Sep 22 '11 at 12:16