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System Software Notes

Verbose Boot for Your Mac

Mac OS X 10.4.9

On Macintouch Don Hurter says

I cannot stress enough performing system updates one step at a time (others here have detailed their cautious procedures, so I won’t repeat them), but one additional step is to monitor the first reboot after the update using ‘verbose mode’. You can do this by holding down command-v at startup, or make it a permanent routine by typing the following into a terminal window:
sudo nvram boot-args=”-v”
Doing so will allow you to see exactly where in the boot process the system is taking its time (such as during an Airport firmware update, for example), whereas relying on the default graphical boot status leaves you guessing as to what’s happening during the long pauses.
Since users now reboot so infrequently, who cares if the startup screen seems pretty or not? Err on the side of more information, and switch to verbose mode.

3 replies on “Verbose Boot for Your Mac”

i found your site while searching on the date command on darwin/osx.

There was a time when i could type :
date –date=”yesterday”

but today i cant. Seems i must have (at that time) installed a version of date using fink or darwinports or something, that gave me that feature. But the version got overwritten with OS X updates.

Do you know which module/package the date command comes with (like fileutils etc) and where such a version such a available.

thanks.
rb
p.s. you have gr8 stuff here, must add u to Google Reader.

>http://www.mail-archive.com/coreutils-announce@gnu.org/msg00022.html

thanks a lot. after further searching i realized that my memory of “date –date” must be from pre-MAC days, when i used Linux. I did the switch 2 years back. And so it was GNU’s date.

i am downloading it … but the worry of using anything that does not come with the stock OS X compile, is that a script i share with others, will not be able to run on their machines if it is dependent on GNU programs.

anyway, thanks for the link — i did hunt quite a bit and land up on gnu.org but failed to get further.