If the machine takes a long time to shutdown it usually means it's waiting on some process to end. One thing that will take a while is to stop is a GPU crunching SETI. Are you stopping BOINC from running before you hit the restart? That happens a Lot when one GPU drops off line and can't be stopped by the driver. I'm not saying that's your problem, however, a hung restart is usually caused by the OS waiting for something to stop.

As I mentioned the other day, I can only find one Grub file that can be edited called "grub.cfg", but at the very top it says NOT to edit this file. Where do I turn off that splash screen? I scanned through that file and didn't see anything relating to a splash screen.

The grub configuration file is in /etc/default/

You need to edit the file with

 sudo nano grub

and the line you need to change is

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Just delete the quit splash and leave just the double quotes with nothing between them.

In nano, then CTRL-O to write the edited file and then CTRL-X to quit nano.

Then still in the Terminal, do a

sudo update-grub

to write out the edited grub configuration change to the "real" grub file in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

You never edit that file directly. Only indirectly through the configuration file in /etc/default.

With this change you will now see the operating system load itself and can watch for errors while all the modules load.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Hi Keith,

I did as you mentioned in that post. I edited the grub file with nano and removed the 'quiet splash' between the ""s. I saved the file, exited nano and did the 'update-grub'.

I really don't see how that will fix my "Mint splash screen" event that I see. When I get ready to log into Winders and do some World of Warcraft, I use BT to report any WUs ready to report. I then shut down BOINC after selecting to "Stop running tasks". BOINC is not running. I right click the BT icon and click Exit to shut it down. I shut down Firefox and nothing else substantial is running. I then click the Mint menu button, then the Quit button and a window pops up with what to do. I click Restart. Right away I get the Mint splash screen once in a while, it's not all the time, just after about every 6th or 7th time I have booted into Linux. The PC has NOT even gone through POST let alone brought up the Grub loader menu for selecting Winders.

How is what I did, with the Grub file, going to stop the Mint splash screen from showing? Is this some other thing we noobs need to learn about Linux? I can see what I did letting me see everything Linux is doing when it is booting. I see it with my Pis. But that will happen AFTER I have hit Enter in the Grub menu to boot into Linux Mint. Right now I see no splash screen or anything when Linux is booting.

I don't know how else to explain what I am seeing now and then. The PC has not even gone through the shut down procedure to restart when I see the splash screen. I click Restart and BAM! There's the splash screen. I'd do a screen capture but... that is impossible. It's like when I first wanted to see what Mint was all about. I was running Winders and put the Mint USB drive in a port and it booted into live boot while Winders was still running. The splash screen that comes up when I did that is what I am seeing now and then.

Well, I guess I'll get to see "behind the scenes action" now while Linux is booting up. lol ;) I believe several days ago I mentioned that I would just live with what is happening. But, I believe I would rather resolve this instead.

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

If the machine takes a long time to shutdown it usually means it's waiting on some process to end. One thing that will take a while is to stop is a GPU crunching SETI. Are you stopping BOINC from running before you hit the restart? That happens a Lot when one GPU drops off line and can't be stopped by the driver. I'm not saying that's your problem, however, a hung restart is usually caused by the OS waiting for something to stop.

Hi TBar,

Please see my post to Keith. There are a few explanations of when I see the Mint splash screen. Has nothing to do with shutting down. The PC isn't doing anything when this happens. All I see is the splash screen that I should not be seeing. No POST, no restart, no Grub loader, nothing...

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

OK, now see what you are talking about, not the standard definition of a "splash screen" I believe this is some foible specific to Mint. I certainly do not see any Ubuntu "splash screen" when shutting down or rebooting. I might see some command line text about processes shutting down or finishing up, but nothing via the graphics manager, just simple text.

Have you checked the Mint forums for similar posts about this strange behavior? Must be some settings for the Desktop that is either default or you have misconfigured. Have you recently updated your Mint installation? Has Mint always done this or something that only has happened recently. Check for what has been updated since before the problem was not appearing.

[Edit] A simple search in the Mint forums showed this setting as the likely cause and how to get around the progress dots.

If you have the plymouth splash screen on shutdown that hides the console messages with the Mint logo and progress dots, then hit ESC to see what's going on behind the curtains... and record it with your video camera for playback later.

You can then see what process is taking so long to shut down. I sometimes have some process, most often the CUPS printer subsystem hang around for 90 seconds before it times out and the reboot finishes.

[Edit 2] Look for the shutdown configuration settings and see if it the Mint logo and progress dots can be disabled so you can see the normal console messages.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

As mentioned before, I only have the splash screen issue after the use of the Timeshift program, and its happening on both my Mint installs . Been googling after a solution, but can't find any.

OK, now see what you are talking about, not the standard definition of a "splash screen" I believe this is some foible specific to Mint. I certainly do not see any Ubuntu "splash screen" when shutting down or rebooting. I might see some command line text about processes shutting down or finishing up, but nothing via the graphics manager, just simple text.

Have you checked the Mint forums for similar posts about this strange behavior? Must be some settings for the Desktop that is either default or you have misconfigured. Have you recently updated your Mint installation? Has Mint always done this or something that only has happened recently. Check for what has been updated since before the problem was not appearing.

[Edit] A simple search in the Mint forums showed this setting as the likely cause and how to get around the progress dots.

If you have the plymouth splash screen on shutdown that hides the console messages with the Mint logo and progress dots, then hit ESC to see what's going on behind the curtains... and record it with your video camera for playback later.

You can then see what process is taking so long to shut down. I sometimes have some process, most often the CUPS printer subsystem hang around for 90 seconds before it times out and the reboot finishes.

[Edit 2] Look for the shutdown configuration settings and see if it the Mint logo and progress dots can be disabled so you can see the normal console messages.

Hi Keith,

Sokath, his eyes uncovered! (Tamarian metaphor for "understanding" - from the "Darmok" episode of ST:TNG) :)

Plymouth is a theme and theme manager for Linux (Mint?). I don't have it. But, the next time this happens I shall hit the ESC key and see what happens.

I have been trying to find the shutdown configuration settings both in Mint and searching about it on the Internet. No such luck in finding anything about it yet. I've looked through the System Settings Control Center and have found nothing pertaining yet. Although, I did find a setting for making these hair thin scroll bars a little wider. Yeehaa! :) I shall endeavor... Dang this spell checker. It keeps telling me words are misspelled and when I right click the word, the British way of spelling it shows up. Anyway, I shall endeavor to continue to find a solution to this issue. :)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I have been trying to find the shutdown configuration settings both in Mint and searching about it on the Internet. No such luck in finding anything about it yet. I've looked through the System Settings Control Center and have found nothing pertaining yet. Although, I did find a setting for making these hair thin scroll bars a little wider. Yeehaa! :) I shall endeavor... Dang this spell checker. It keeps telling me words are misspelled and when I right click the word, the British way of spelling it shows up. Anyway, I shall endeavor to continue to find a solution to this issue. :)

Does Mint have the equivalent of Ubuntu Tweak utility? That allows configuration of just about every interface element there is in Gnome.
Try this help page:
https://www.linuxhelp.com/how-to-install-gnome-tweak-tool-in-linux-mint-18-3

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Greetings,

Dang! I forgot all about this thread. I posted something elsewhere that should have been posted here.

Whatever I have done over the past few weeks has seemed to resolve the splash screen issue. After disabling the splash screen, I was able to see what Linux was doing when it was shutting down/restarting. I could not make heads or tails of what it was doing. This no longer happens, so I'm assuming that this issue has been resolved.

Thank you to everyone for the help given! :)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Greetings,

Today, I have upgraded my main to the current Linux Mint OS, 19.3 Tricia. I followed some instructions I found on the Internet. The first thing the instructions said to do was to do a Timeshift of the current OS. I did so (after figuring out that by default it puts the "Snapshots" in the File system directory /. I have changed it to put them on the Home directory which is much larger).

Ok, to my questions: How do I change Timeshift so that it will not backup the BOINC folder? Or should I allow it to back it up? And, should the snapshots be daily, weekly or monthly?

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

I tried installing Linux as a dual boot option a few weeks ago. For whatever reason it takes a really long time to find a storage device to install to and when it does it thinks it's free space. Before I started I allocated a partition of 200gb to use for Linux but the installer thinks the whole drive (M.2) is unformatted. Upon reboot without installing the system enters a power on/off cycle. The machine is on long enough for the fans to spin up then shuts off. This is only fixed by removing the battery to clear the CMOS. I've tried this 3x with Ubuntu and a couple other live images from other distros and have the same issue. What could be causing this odd behavior? I've never experienced anything like this with Linux. My guess is some incompatibility with hardware or microcode.

My machine:
ASRock B360M "XTreme" (stripped down version of the B360M PRO 4)
i7 8700
32GB Ballistix DDR4 2666
M.2 1TB Samsung 970 EVO+
1TB SATA 3 HDD
EVGA 2080 ti XC Ultra
Gigabyte 1060 6GB

Given that BIOSs allow you to select what device to boot from, and storage is dirt cheap, most people these days just don't bother wrestling with dual boot drives.
Install an OS on one drive, install another OS on another drive. When booting, select which drive to boot from.

Many of those that once used dual booting now just have a basic OS to boot from, and use Virtual Machines to take care of their OS requirements for whatever it is they need to do at the time.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

Greetings,

Today, I have upgraded my main to the current Linux Mint OS, 19.3 Tricia. I followed some instructions I found on the Internet. The first thing the instructions said to do was to do a Timeshift of the current OS. I did so (after figuring out that by default it puts the "Snapshots" in the File system directory /. I have changed it to put them on the Home directory which is much larger).

Ok, to my questions: How do I change Timeshift so that it will not backup the BOINC folder? Or should I allow it to back it up? And, should the snapshots be daily, weekly or monthly?

Have a great day! :)

Siran

You exclude folders you don't want in the backup. I think that Timeshift should only backup the system files and leave everything in /home alone and excluded.

For backing up the /home folder, I think that deja-dup is the better solution.

I have deja-dup backing up every week. I have Timeshift backing up every hour which I think is the default setting.

I exclude the BOINC folders since if you restore your BOINC folders to an earlier time you will ghost all your current work and create a new hostID since the rpc_seqno will be wrong. The BOINC data folders changes to often to bother.

I would selectively backup the BOINC files excluding the client_state files, job_log files, the scheduler files and just get the cc_config file, gui_rpc_auth.cfg file and the remote_hosts.cfg file and client and Manager binaries. If you have an anonymous platform I would backup the binaries and the app_info and app_config files.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I tried installing Linux as a dual boot option a few weeks ago. For whatever reason it takes a really long time to find a storage device to install to and when it does it thinks it's free space. Before I started I allocated a partition of 200gb to use for Linux but the installer thinks the whole drive (M.2) is unformatted. Upon reboot without installing the system enters a power on/off cycle. The machine is on long enough for the fans to spin up then shuts off. This is only fixed by removing the battery to clear the CMOS. I've tried this 3x with Ubuntu and a couple other live images from other distros and have the same issue. What could be causing this odd behavior? I've never experienced anything like this with Linux. My guess is some incompatibility with hardware or microcode.

My machine:
ASRock B360M "XTreme" (stripped down version of the B360M PRO 4)
i7 8700
32GB Ballistix DDR4 2666
M.2 1TB Samsung 970 EVO+
1TB SATA 3 HDD
EVGA 2080 ti XC Ultra
Gigabyte 1060 6GB

Linux, really prefers a GPT formatted drive and a UEFI or EFI boot solution. My preference is to avoid a dual boot in the first place as Windows never respects an alternative OS on the same drive.

Better solution is to install Linux onto a separate hard drive and use the BIOS to switch between which one is booted from. An inexpensive 128GB SSD is less than $35 to throw Linux on.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Greetings,

Hi Keith,

My preference is to avoid a dual boot in the first place as Windows never respects an alternative OS on the same drive.

I have Winders 10 and Linux Mint on the same 1TB M.2 drive. I had Windows on it first when I cloned my original 250GB M.2 drive to the 1TB drive. I'm not sure what you mean by Winders not respecting another OS on the same drive. I had no problems installing Linux on the same drive. I believe I have seen this mentioned before, maybe not here, but I seem to remember mention of it. Maybe it was on a different forum than SETI when looking for stuff.

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Greetings,

Hi Keith,

You exclude folders you don't want in the backup. I think that Timeshift should only backup the system files and leave everything in /home alone and excluded.

Yep, you're correct, Timeshift only backs up system files. By default, /root** and /home** are excluded. Timeshift is a Linux version of Micro$oft Restore Point.

I did some more searching on the Internet and found more info on Timeshift. I need to get me a bigger USB flash drive. The largest I have is 32GB. The initial Snapshot takes up a BIG chunk of that. I can do a format of the USB drive, on the fly, to a Linux file format. Timeshift will not write to anything but a Linux file format. Right now I have my Timeshift snapshot on my /home partition. If something happens, I'll have to boot into a live boot and restore that way, if I don't have access through the installed Linux OS.

I kinda like the idea of not doing a dual boot scenario, but I can never remember which function key brings up the boot menu, if Asus even does that. I'd have to look through my motherboard manual to find out. I don't remember ever seeing anything about a boot menu on Asus. I still have Winders on the original M.2 drive. I could put it on the SATA M.2 slot and use the 1TB solely for Linux. :)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

It should be the ESC key, I usually keep tapping it, but they generally say to hold it down to get into the BIOS on Boot

---

SETI@home classic workunits 4,019
SETI@home classic CPU time 34,348 hours

On my ASUS boards, F8 brings up the boot menu at the BIOS splash screen. Also there is a menu prompt at the bottom of the screen telling you what F key functions do.

But if you hide your BIOS splash screen with the vendor logo or have it timeout too fast, then you would never see the menu choices at the bottom.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

It should be the ESC key, I usually keep tapping it, but they generally say to hold it down to get into the BIOS on Boot

On my ASUS C7H boards, the F8 key presents you with the choice of which drive to boot from directly. You don't even enter the BIOS. You just boot right then from the selected drive.

You can also make the boot choice in the BIOS boot menu priority selection page. But using F8 is faster and more direct.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

It should be the ESC key, I usually keep tapping it, but they generally say to hold it down to get into the BIOS on Boot

Hi Bill,

Most, if not all, Asus laptops use ESC for the boot menu. My Prime Z370-A motherboard uses the F8 function key to get the boot menu. I did some digging on the Internet. ;)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath