How to pause Linux boot screen?

Pause Unpause Linux Boot Screen - blackMORE OpsHow many time you wanted to pause unpause Linux boot screen to check out some errors? This screen goes away too fast and you’re then prompted with Login screen. Once logged in, you’re too busy doing something else that you completely forgot that error that glided through boot screen too fast.
A very common problem is when you upgrade Linux Kernel to a new one sometimes your boot screen will show that old gem of a problem “Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempting to kill init !” But the most annoying problem with it is that all the boot messages scroll off the top of the screen before you can read them and it’s no use saying look at dmesg or /var/log/messages  or /var/log/dmesg because the root file system isn’t there yet (Filesystem loads after a success boot).
This is a quick and easy solution to pause boot screen so that you can read it without crunching though logs later on.

Pause unpause Linux boot screen

Laptops

Following is what works best in Laptop:

Ctrl+S to Stop
Ctrl+Q to Resume

Desktops with full Keyboard

If you have a full fledged keyboard, try

Scroll Lock and Scroll Unlock buttons.

More alternatives

Other suggested solutions are

Pause/Break button combination

(p.s. never worked for me, you some people reckons it worked for them.

Once you’re logged in,open a terminal window and type in

dmesg | less

and you see something like this:

[   12.814960] RPC: Registered udp transport module.
[   12.814962] RPC: Registered tcp transport module.
[   12.814964] RPC: Registered tcp NFSv4.1 backchannel transport module.
[   12.856736] FS-Cache: Loaded
[   12.868714] Key type dns_resolver registered
[   12.912022] FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching
[   12.952379] Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).

Now you can just use SPACE BAR to scroll through the logs to find what you’re after. Quite ugly, eh!

GUI alternate is to use System Log Viewer and look for dmesg/message logs by date/time. System Log Viewer is built into pretty much any modern Desktop Environments (i.e. Gnome, KDE, MATE. XFCE, LXDE etc.).

Mine gives some errors like below:

15/10/13 10:23:43 PM    testing    kernel    [    0.294180] ACPI Error: Invalid/unsupported resource descriptor: Type 0x00 (20120913/utresrc-650)
15/10/13 10:23:43 PM    testing    kernel    [    7.124168] ACPI Error: Needed [Buffer/String/Package], found [Integer] ffff880235edb300 (20120913/exresop-590)
15/10/13 10:23:43 PM    testing    kernel    [    7.124194] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0._DSM] (Node ffff8802370a2790), AE_AML_OPERAND_TYPE (20120913/psparse-536)
15/10/13 10:23:43 PM    testing    kernel    [   10.390634] EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
15/10/13 10:23:49 PM    testing    NetworkManager[2970]    <warn> bluez error getting default adapter: The name org.bluez was not provided by any .service files
15/10/13 10:25:19 PM    testing    NetworkManager[4730]    <warn> bluez error getting default adapter: The name org.bluez was not provided by any .service files

I think I’ll just ignore those errors for now!

Hope that helps. Please share & RT.

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One comment

  1. Ctrl+S to Stop

    Ctrl+Q to Resume

    WORKS!!!

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