Booting the System

In the previous chapter, we covered the common hardware settings we manage on a daily basis. We touched on some commands that can be used to identify the hardware within a Linux system. This chapter continues from there and takes a step further, this time focusing on the process of booting the system. This looks at the GRUB and GRUB2 configuration files, focusing on the timer, default boot entry, and passing arguments to the GRUB/GRUB2 boot menu. It also covers the chkconfig, pstree, ps, systemctl, and dmeg commands, as well as the various start/stop scripts.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• The boot process explained
• Understanding GRUB and GRUB2
• Working with GRUB
• Working with GRUB2