Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Getting Grubby & Demystifying Linux Booting

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-like-to-look-at-newbies dept.

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."

7 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Bad article by vidarlo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Bad article by KillerBob · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, but that's very *very* distro-specific.

      Slackware-based distros, for example, use runlevel 4 for X instead of RL 5. They also have *all* init scripts in /etc/rc.d, and the scripts are started on basis of whether they're executable. Anything runlevel-specific, like login managers and X servers are then loaded from /etc/rc.d/rcX.S where X is the runlevel.

      that's to say nothing of distros that aren't even using SysV init, like the current version of Ubuntu and anything BSD-based.

      It was pretty obvious that the author hasn't done his research, and that it's a pretty poor attempt at explaining stuff. I was rather hoping for an article where the author would actually parse the output of dmesg and explain, line for line, what everything meant. That would actually be informative. Instead, he gave information that was specific to RedHat Linux, a lot of which doesn't apply to other distros. I wouldn't even be complaining so much, except that he didn't even bother to write it specific to the most popular Linux distro. RedHat was the most popular when I started with Linux, over a decade ago. These days, that crown belongs to Ubuntu. If you're going to write something distro-specific, at least write it for the most popular one.

      Obligatory disclaimer: The last version of RedHat that I used was RedHat 6.0. When 7.0 came out, I switched to Slackware. I now use Zenwalk (slack-based, formerly MiniSlack, http://www.zenwalk.org/), having switched at Zenwalk 2.4. I have tried other distros, including Ubuntu, and still prefer Slackware-based distributions, and I find that the Zenwalk community and package management tools are the best of that breed.

      --
      If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
  2. Re:Redhat specific by Procasinator · · Score: 5, Funny

    Be wery, wery quiet.... I'm hunting grubby webhats!

  3. Pathetic by Anrego · · Score: 4, Informative

    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..

  4. Windows refugees by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article won't help, however... It is not nearly detailed enough for learning anything. For the recent immigrants from Windows, it is a great roadmap.
    1. Re:Windows refugees by NeverVotedBush · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  5. It's Web 2.0 by SignupRequired · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.