Whenever my linux laptop boots up, I see the various messages scrolling up the screen really fast, which makes it hard to read them. What's important, is that there's some error messages that I'd like to investigate. Unfortunately, these error messages scroll by way to fast.

Luckily, there's a way to log these boot messages to a file so that they can be read later once the system is running. I'll show you how to enable boot message logging. This works on Debian lenny but might also work on Ubuntu and other Debian derived linux distributions.

As root, edit the file /etc/default/bootlogd

The file should look something like this at first:

 

# Run bootlogd at startup ?
BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=No

 

Simply change the "No" to "Yes", save the file, reboot, and your boot messages should be logged to a file located at /var/log/boot .