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-theme text
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

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

Answer 2

If you boot in text mode which is how most servers would be set up you have to do the following. In text mode, plymouth paints a colorful text bar which is difficult to completely remove. It's NOT in chkconfig and disabling "rhgb" and "quiet" do not disable this feature. Here's how to do it properly in CentOS 6.x. Steps 1 and 2 also disable features that can cause trouble on a server or virtual machine that should not be provisioned with a graphical console.

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

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

3) Type plymouth-set-default-theme details --rebuild-initrd.

4) 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.

Answer 3

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 4

Just found this method, and it seems the cleanest way:

grubby --update-kernel=ALL --remove-args="rhgb quiet"

Answer 5

Actually, removing rhgb, which I presume stands for "RedHatGraphicalBoot" solved this issue for me on CentOS6.

Just add this line to your post install ks.conf script:

#Save original, just in case
rsync /boot/grub/grub.conf /boot/grub/grub.conf.orig
#edit and output to /tmp/grub.conf
cat /boot/grub/grub.conf |sed -e s/rhgb// > /tmp/grub.conf 
#replace & remove temp
cat /tmp/grub.conf > /boot/grub/grub.conf ; rm -f /tmp/grub.conf

Answer 6

Or in one line (less maintenance and at least as easy to understand):

sed -i .orig s/rhgb///g /boot/grub/grub.conf

Creates a backup first, and edits the file inline.