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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."
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.
And there are apparently quite a few Windows immigrants. More how-to and helping them get their Linux-legs is a good thing. And they will need all levels of articles too.
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.
Part right, part wrong.
/etc/lilo.conf.
LILO copies a kernel image to its boot area. It doesn't matter if you change the kernel on the hard drive, because LILO's installed image won't change until you invoke the "lilo" command. I've actually seen LILO successfully boot a kernel and initrd (which panicked) after I had formatted a drive and removed all of the partitions, because I hadn't bothered to wipe the MBR.
With GRUB, however, it's live. If you make a change to your menu.lst file, that change will take effect immediately. And while admittedly, I don't use GRUB, I don't think there's actually a test utility that will tell you whether your menu.lst is properly configured without rebooting. Correct me if I'm wrong, as I frequently am. The recovery console is useful, but as I'm often tinkering with things, I prefer to have a bootloader that's static, and won't change until I explicitly tell it to. There's also the "lilo -v -t" command to test when I make a change to
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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
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.
It's technical enough to divide the Moorlocks from the complete Eloi that call the beige box on their desk a "hard drive".
Here's what would help Windows immigrants:
An easy way to record video and post to YouTube.
An EASIER way to make mp3s out of a CD (out of the box).
Distros defaulting to the obvious preferable applications: Thunderbird, VLC, etc.
Some more decent games besides Urban Terror and Emulators.
More and Better Hardware companies supporting Linux.
Easy and Fast Videoconferencing via speex and h.264
Not needing to configure Grub at all.
Also (in Ubuntu), not having an infinite list of growing kernels to choose show up in Grub.
More improvements to Gimp and Open Office so they can actually replace Photoshop and MS Office.
Never, Ever getting Error 22 again on boot.
I mean, there are REAL things that Windows refugees need, and I don't think a half-ass tutorial about grub is it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.