Upon an upgrade from Karmic, the final reboot into Lucid server yields a splash screen and no status messages visible on boot up. The server guide claims one can go to tty7 to see boot up messages. Well, there are almost none and kernel messages are turned off.

A look at /boot/grub/menu.lst

  ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
  ## alternatives
  ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
  # defoptions=quiet splash

A quick change to

  # defoptions=nosplash

and a kernel option list of

  ro nosplash

almost fixes the kernel console splash screen problem.

The console always defaults to vga16 framebuffer mode. This results in really slow console response on VM's.

The final console fix to restore a text console is

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf

  blacklist vga16fb

Next post: Disabling the new Ubuntu "feature" called plymouth.