Getting an Ubuntu 12.04 machine to give you boot messages

The main changes we need to make are to /etc/default/grub, which magically controls the behavior of Grub2. We needed to make two main changes:

• change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to delete 'quiet splash'. On 12.04 servers without a serial console, we leave this blank.
• uncomment the 'GRUB_TERMINAL=console' line. Without this change the console stays blank for a while and only the later boot messages show.

  (I don't understand why this is necessary; my best understanding of the Grub2 documentation is that 'console' should be the default.)

We've also changed GRUB_TIMEOUT to 5 (seconds) and commented out GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT andGRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET. This causes the Grub2 menu to always show for five seconds, which I find much more useful than the default behavior of having to hold down Shift at exactly the right time in order to get the menu to show.