[lug] dumpdates

[Chris Riddoch]

John Starkey <jstarkey at ajstarkey.com> writes:
> What exactly is needed for linux to boot then?

That's a useful thing to learn, actually.

The bios kickstarts LILO (or another such loader), LILO loads the
kernel.  The kernel cranks up and eventually runs init, and init takes
things from there.

You can customize init by configuring /etc/inittab, but I don't
recommend doing that and have only had need to do it once - I wanted
more virtual terminals.  I've since learned about the 'screen'
program, so don't bother.

Learning about /etc/inittab will teach you about runlevels,
single-user mode, what happens when you're booting up, shutting down,
rebooting, how filesystems are safely loaded and unloaded, and so on.
This will in turn point you to the scripts that load daemons, start
networking, and generally set things up.  If you're going to play
around with these, make sure you have a boot *and* a root floppy
available and know how to use them, because you'll need it.  It's
quite easy to make your system simply stop loading up on bootup, but
pretty easy to fix if your root floppy has an editor you know how to
use on it, *and* you remember the changes you made.

I have a notebook sitting on my desk to keep track of changes I've
made and significant things I've learned.  It's probably the most
useful thing I own that has to do with computers, besides the
computers themselves.

--
Chris Riddoch
socket at peakpeak.com