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The user shouldn't see the console when Ubuntu starts up and shuts down. Not even a blink of the console cursor. Breezy fails short in this area. Here's an review of Breezy's startup and shutdown sequence:

• Grub menu (could use some improvements) This is the part where the user can choose to boot in recovery mode, among other things. It is desireable to have a more beautiful screen like in SUSE 10.
• Grub console output (must fix!) After making a choice, Grub spits its output to the console. When selecting the default choice on my machine, the output is

     Booting 'Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386 '
  root  (hd0,2)
    Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
  kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro quiet splash
     [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1c00, size=0x12411b]
  initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
     [Linux-initrd @ 0x1fb2a000, 0x4b5649 bytes]
  savedefault
  boot
  Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
  Loading, please wait...

  The user should not see this message! The solution is to have Grub not output anything by default. For diagnostic purposes, there should be an option to enable the output (temporarily) trough the Grub menu.
• Framebuffer (?) based Ubuntu booting sequence (OK) This is the part where the Ubuntu image is shown on the screen. Definitely an improvement over Hoary.
• Resuming hibernation (must fix!) Oops, but when the user is resuming from a hibernation, the console reappears and various messages are shown. Resuming hibernation shouldn't make the console appear!
• Before GDM (must fix!) On this stage a console appears and a console cursor is shown. Plain ugly and should be removed on Dapper!
• GDM to XDMP (must fix!) The user can select the textbox on GDM and press F10 to get a menu which has "XDMP Chooser..." as one of its submenu. Selecting it brings the console with the cursor shown (before going to the chooser!) Getting back to GDM brings a blank screen (before finally going to GDM) but no console cursor is shown.

• Restarting/shutting down (must fix!) - see SplashDown A console appears, with the first message

  ---
      System is rebooting, please wait...
                                         ---

  or

  ---
      System is shutting down, please wait...
                                             ---

  The shutdown process should be graphical like the framebuffer-based booting sequence!

• Hibernating (could use some improvements) - see SplashDown In Breezy the screen just blacks out. It would be desirable to have a progress bar like when hibernating in Windows XP.

Original author: Agro1986