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Getting Grubby & Demystifying Linux Booting
davidmwilliams writes "Linux users can boast long times between reboots, but even so, the startup screens will grace your display at some time. Here's just what your computer is doing during this process, what the messages mean, and how you can take control."
The aritcle is wery redhat specific.
When i Moderate something -1 Flamebait, why do i not get another modpoint?
5--1 = 6
Nothing new, and the author has apparently not used any other distros than the Redhat based ones. Nor has he heard about lilo or syslinux. First page of article looks like the man page of grub, listing the format for the menu.lst file of grub. Since it mentions selinux and redhat, I bet most of that page is copied more or less in verbatim from Redhat's manual. And since such a short article is split over 3 pages, and last page is laden with icons for digg, slashdot etc. I believe this is just an attempt to get some readers... Just don't bother to RTFA!
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Yeah, but that is all about the desktop, even if you agree with him. This is a nerd oriented technical article.
How can you have an article about init without even mentioning upstart? Ubuntu has been using it since 6.10.
Bah!
That article was just pathetic.
The concept to write an article about the boot process actually sounds cool, seeing as how there is quite a bit text that whips by on start up which many (even long time) Linux users don`t understand.
This article however, was a really lame attempt to do so. It was very general, without even so much as a sample of text from dmesg. And what was there was very distro-specific. It just provided a quick over view of the major parts of the boot process, and didn`t even do that very well.
Anyway, as someone said before, don`t even bother reading TFA..
I read the article before it was written, as the documentation of Gentoo installation.
Except that TFA is Redhat specific, that is.
Ever since somebody decided "Web 2.0" existed, there's been a big slew of these awful new "IT stuff" sites that look like they've been designed using a checklist of Web 2.0 mainstays and buzzwords. User ratings? Check. Submit news? Check. Blogs? Check. Annoying multipage articles? Check. Attention whoring abuse of social bookmarking sites at the end of every article? Check. More banner ads than content on any given page? Check. User comments? Check. Half of it is actually a decade old and was pioneered by Slashdot, but thanks to the magic of buzzwords, everything old is new.
And with all of this stuff in place, they invariably fail to even attempt the final hurdle: creating decent content. Instead of picking one of the two available routes (create good content vs Slashdot-style aggregation), they seem to like to go halfway, with awkward "stories" like this half-boiled Red Hat GRUB HOWTO masquerading as "Breaking News".
Sure, maybe these are probably all honest people trying to kick-start their journalism careers. But if so, what the hell are they doing throwing this crap around? Even Katz was more interesting than this trash.
The article is getting enough hate already, so I'm not gonna add to that. Instead I'm gonna say what I'd like to see in an article: a breakdown of what loading the kernel actually means. I'd like to know exactly what happens between the boot loader doing it's thing and init firing off the runlevel scripts.
As sad in previous posts this Article is about init, which is about to be obsoleted by upstart (at least in ubuntu and debian, but i think others will follow). Upstart can work as a drop-in replacement for init, and has done so in Ubuntu 6.10. Here is an old but nice Article about Linux Booting, that includes init and upstart.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
[I use hibernate on Fedora all the time, so I'd love to see a patch like this go in to Fedora's grub. Thing is, the patch is apparently based on swsusp2, and I'm not sure Fedora's kernel uses the swsusp2 version of hibernation.]
In a reply to the post, a debian guy points out that grub is legacy at this point, and that they are looking to move to grub2.
So what does grub offer? The Via K?800 problem has been unresolved over the last 5 years and there's no reason not to have fixed it by now. Hell if I was repurposing old windows machines to Linux, more then likely they'd have that damn chipset.
On the new Intel chipset, as stated grub couldn't even finish booting. Wheres the kernel couldn't see the damn SATA drive (scsi mode idiots), thus making it absolutely useless, while Lilo has worked on every x86 based system I've installed it on and this makes me wonder, why should I use something as buggy and flawed as Grub for a stupid splash screen? It's Linux idiots, we don't reboot systems every stinking time we install/upgrade software (thankyou very much MS). Hell I haven't shut my system down fo 2 weeks since the last install (Gentoo from Stage1 - GCC-4.2.0) and I'm always testing things.
So once again, Why use something that doesn't work well on common Via K8 chipsets and can't even finish booting on a brand new Intel 965 board with only SATA installed?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Is there a credible site with up to date links to the best Linux documentation?
Most documentation states the obvious then stops just at the point of being useful!
...is the users.
Get off your ass and write an Ubuntu-specific article, then. "Many more"? Please.
There are so many ways to boot linux, all different and interesting:
- the standard way, from the boot sector of your hard drive
- the live-cd way, from an eltorito image on a cd-rom or dvd-rom
- the original way, from a floppy drive
- some machines let you boot from a zip drive
- from a usb key, which could be any of the above under the covers
- over the network, using pxelinux
- out of rom
This article has no interesting content whatsoever.
Huh? This is old news, and hardly technical at all -- by my standards, anyway.
Now, whitepapers, the ACM, IEEE, RFCs, etc... those are technical.
Modded down only because you're an AC who happened to speak absolute fact in a First Post. Sure, the absolute truth was burdened by a Dadaist personal attack against TacoMan, or whatever, but still, the groupthink here is suppressing the truth.
Information doesn't want to be free when peer pressure is in play. Slashdot denizens are stupid sheep, cowed by the threat of metamoderation.
Sigh. More climate change deniers.
Look kids, it's time to grow out of willy-waving contests about how long you can keep it up, and turn the ****ing thing off when you're not using it.
That would be a GREAT idea, if only you showed us your secret way of resuming from cold boot within 0.5 seconds when the machine recieves a tcp syn packet on port 80.
It's gonna first run init innit?
My willy is never off.
It's a curse.
Well, for one thing I've found it's nice just to be able to update options, etc without having to re-write over my boot-record every single time. Grub writes to the boot-record once, and - provided that you don't change the location of the config file/partition/etc - you can then just update the menu.lst file on the config partition without needing to reinstall the bootloader into the MBR with every new kernel or change.
As to climate change, hell yes we're suffering climate changes but are the man-made or because we've entered the 50 year increased solar activity period of the 100 year cycle? The other question is who pays for the demanded changes and will they do any damn good? The damn research has gone about finding a solution the wrong way.
Instead of looking at how to cut energy demands by
getting rid of all parasitic electronic loads
and you'd be surprised how fast those parasitic loads add up. The simple example is a 5watt load that's on 24/7. That consumes 1kw every 8d:6h, meaning just under 3kw in a month. Check how much is being used by the tv/stereo/surround sound, digital clocks, cordless phones, cable box, printers and such and you'll get an idea why the average household now uses more then 7.5kw per month.
Now go and check all of your electronics and see if they're actually off instead of in standby before you bring up global warming again.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Seriously, why do people post such crap on slashdot?? what next, a review for "bash for Dummies"? "guide to pushing a power button"?
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
Some of us use the things for stuff like serving web pages. In that case a couple of hundred days between power cycles or reboots is a pretty short time.
A good way to know about the boot process is to install Linux From Scratch.
I always got annoyed about things that run on my computer that I don't know what it is, and if removing it would break anything. LFS clarified for me many dark-spots about the boot process. I even ran the installed system for almost a year, but it got harder to keep up-to-date with package versions, and I came back to using a normal distro.
factor 966971: 966971
It's technical enough to divide the Moorlocks from the complete Eloi that call the beige box on their desk a "hard drive".
Yeah, I'll tell that to the users of my clusters that since there was no activity, I turned it off.
I need uptime, need it bad, and linux delivers it.
The funniest joke ever played on the human race was that electricity causes climate change. Because carbon dioxide is BAD. LOL. One of the primary components of our AIR is DESTROYING THE PLANET!!! AHHHHH!!
The planets fine. It doesn't care how much it rains in your town.
You want to understand the linux boot process better the best way is to build yourself your own mini linux boot disk.
All you really need is busybox(gnu tools), the c library and linux kernel. It doesn't do much, but it will help you learn how it works.
It's a lot more interesting than reading that article.
Sure it mentions a few examples that are picked from RHEL but most of the stuff is very general. Never used RHEL and had no problems perfectly understanding the article.
Migule de Icaza!
a courtesy of Novell Inc,
sponsored by Microsoft.
And the monitor is the 'computer', heh. Ah, the mind boggles..
Isn't Eloi Aramaic for 'father'? o_0
which is totally what she said
mod parent + grandparent up
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
H.G.Wells - "The Time Machine" which is set as a high school english reading text in a few places. Many disfunctional businesses divide into groups like the Eloi and Moorlocks in the novel, sometimes even after HR is employing people purely on the way they look. When the techs and the "beautiful people" can no longer communicate and actively hate each other it becomes an apt description and the company is eating itself.
I did see the movie many years ago (talking of the old one, not the crappy new one), have a feeling I may have read the book too.. thanks for pointing that out though because I'd completely forgotten.
which is totally what she said
Dear Beautiful Mackenzie (an Actual Girl):
I'd like to sneak up behind you and start fondling you violently and then as you struggle to try to escape I'll take a scientifically-proven magic petrification ray from my bag and zap you with it, and it would first disintegrate all your clothing, leaving you gloriously naked, then it would start the process of transforming your body into marble, inducing in you a massive magically-induced which would be captured eternally as your body is turned into solid stone from the feet up to the head gradually, freezing your final moan of ecstasy as you become a beautiful, cold lifeless statue, but with your mind still alive inside the statue, aware of everything that happens to you. I would put you in display in art museums so that everyone could admire your spectacular naked & petrified teen body, then I would put you on a pedestal in my apartment and admire you constantly, and climb up on the pedestal and make love to your stony form, getting my penis raw & red from the friction, and covering your beautiful hard marble skin with my spooge, my beloved naked-and-petrified queen.
(NOTE: This is just a fantasy; I would not actually do this.)
p.s. I like masturbating to your Blogspot picture3