Call me old school, but I find the graphical boot option that Red Hat/Fedora included into their distribution a few years ago highly annoying. Perhaps it's more newbie friendly and looks more polished, but when using it, you lose almost all of the information about what is actually occurring during the boot process. It's one thing to try and make Linux more user friendly, but it's quite another when extremely valuable information is lost in the process. At the very least, seeing the boot process in its entirety tells the user what partitions are being mounted (and where), which services are being started, and if there are any problems. And while we are on the subject, hiding the boot menu from the user is annoying as well! When turning on a computer, I want to see what my boot options are, especially if there is more than one kernel installed, or if there are multiple operating systems present.
To bring your boot process back to the retro days, edit /boot/grub/grub.conf with your favorite editor using sudo. grub (the GRand Unified Bootloader) is in charge of determining what operating systems and kernels are present for you to boot into. I find grub much, much easier to use than lilo (the LInux LOader) used to be. Anyone remember when you had to tell Windows how to use lilo by hand (and very carefully at that!) when setting up a dual boot system? Good days, my friend, good days. =p
In these advanced boot loading days, just edit grub.conf:
~> sudo nano
/boot/grub/grub.conf
Scroll down to the timeout option and
change it to:
timeout=30
This will at least give a reasonable
amount of time (30 s) for old Linux fogeys like myself a chance to
decide what we exactly want to boot into. Next, get rid of
the annoying hidden menu by commenting out the option:
#hiddenmenu
Finally, scroll down to the "kernel" line
and remove the "rhgb"
portion to get rid of the annoying Red Hat Graphical Boot option.
At the time of this writing, I am using kernel version
2.6.19-1.2895.fc6, so your line should look something like:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2895.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/ quiet
but probably not exactly since
you are most likely not booting into kernel version 2.6.19-1.2895.fc6. The important thing to note here is the absence
of "rhgb".
Save and exit.The next time you boot into FC6, witness the retro boot process in all of its glory. Word.