CentOS 6 comes with a splash screen that displays a progress bar as it boots. This looks nice and might be cool on a desktop for some eye candy but I’d rather watch what is happening. You can hit any key during the boot process to make the boot splash screen disappear and display what its doing when its booting but that’s annoying and I’d rather it have it spit out all the gory details of what the server is doing automatically without human intervention.
To make CentOS 6 display the details about what its doing while it boots, first make a backup of the file at /etc/grub.conf in case something goes wrong. Then open /etc/grub.conf in your favorite editor, and look for the line(s) that begin with ‘kernel’. At the end of them you’ll see ‘rhgb’ and ‘quiet’. You’ll want to remove both of those words from grub.conf. After saving your changes, reboot the server and you can see everything its doing when it starts up.
Here’s an example of a grub.conf that has ‘rhgb’ and ‘quiet’ in it:
title CentOS Linux (2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64 ro root=UUID=c209fbd2-0738-4672-b225-6a5c09f65ad2 rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us crashkernel=auto rhgb quiet
