Debian Boot Messages

Want to see the messages flying on the screen when your computer boots after it has completed started? There are two things which will help you: dmesg and bootlogd. dmesg prints out the bootup messages. As far as I understand, it stores messages for the last boot only. Once you reboot, the last messages are replaced by messages of the new boot. But dmesg doesn’t show all messages. So you have to look at bootlogd, which does record all boot messages. To enable it in Debian Squeeze, edit the /etc/default/bootlogd file

sudo vim /etc/default/bootlogd

and change

BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=No

to

BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=yes

On your next boot (or reboot), boot messages should be available at /var/log/boot.

Hat tip to Where is the boot log in debian sarge ??