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Linux Boot

S

sswingle

Diamond Member
I have two questions. First, when the computer is booting, it seems to take forever with something on the screen about GRUB stage 2. What is this all about.
Second, it boots itself to a graphical enviroment. Is there a way to change it so it boots to a command prompt? When I am at the command prompt,
how do I get the graphical to load? How do I tell it which to load (I installed both GNOME and KDS)

Thanks for any help
 
GRUB is your bootloader, it is the middleman between the BIOS and the OS. After you turn your computer on the BIOS loads and does it's thing. It then finds GRUB installed on your boot device and hands control over to it. GRUB knows how to boot your Linux install, so it then loads your kernel and off it goes.

If you are at a command prompt you would type startx in order to bring up the GUI.

What distro are you using?
 
Open up grub.conf and add "init 3" without the quotations to whatever kernel your using to boot to command prompt. Either type startx or init 5 to load gui from there.
 
ctrl-alt-backspace will terminate X-windows..but it's the dirty way. You should just be able to logout and it will return you to the CLI, unless you are running and window manager like KDM, XDM, or GDM.
 
xdm rocks.

Anyhow, for the init level:
Check /etc/inittab . The file will have a line that says (taken out of an old RH install somewhere in the world): id:3:initdefault: . This machine starts at init level 3. If I wanted to start it at init 5, I'd change the 3 to a 5. If I wanted to switch to init 5, I could just type init 5 .

What do these init levels mean n0c?
Well, it can be a bit different between distros and *nixes (last I checked anyhow, maybe they've standardized it now). But generally it works like this:
init 0-6
0 shutdown
1 single user mode
3 multi user mode
5 graphical user mode
6 reboot

If 2 and 4 are used, someone let me know. 😛

Ok, I think I get it. But WTF does Linux do with that runlevel?
Well, using the runlevel, the Linux system knows what software to startup. You should notice a number of directories in /etc. Namely, rc?.d[/b] (the ? stands for a number, 0-6 and init.d. In /etc/init.d there will be scripts that start and stop services. They are typically symlinked to files in /etc/rc?.d, depending on your runlevel. If the file (a symlink to a script in /etc/init.d) in /etc/rc3.d has an S at the beginning, Linux knows to run that script when it reaches runlevel 3.
 
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