Information about customization

GameCodingNinja · 07-29-2014, 09:58 AM

I'm new to building Linux but I built LFS and some BLFS. A lot of work but worth it for the experience.

The question is now, where do I find information about customizing my bootup like a graphical boot screen or other options say boot into desktop. I'm sure many things involve editing config file but I don't know what those config files are and what options are available.

Doing google searches only seem to bring up customizing your current desktop on the level of a standard user. I'm looking for the nitty gritty.

notKlaatu · 07-29-2014, 06:14 PM

graphical boot screen can be accomplished a few ways, but the modern trend is to use Plymouth.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth/

And booting straight into a desktop is generally achieved by creating a runlevel that triggers an init script that starts X and a desktop session manager like KDM or XFCE or whatever. I'm not sure what kind of init system you are using, or how many runlevels you created, but you get the idea.

ReaperX7 · 07-29-2014, 09:44 PM

BLFS has instructions to add KDM, but you might want to consider using KDM after you install sudo and create a proper power user account with some administrative privileges. By default KDM blocks root login, until you exit the profile to allow it.

GameCodingNinja · 07-30-2014, 10:29 AM

Thanks guys! Even though I'm a c++ engineer of 20+ years, my knowledge and upstanding of Linux is that of a Linux Mint user. I decided to go the route of LFS to get a better understanding of the internals of Linux. The concept of "power user account", "run levels" and "init system" escapes me.

Now that I know how to build Linux, I want to know what I can do with it in the form of customization.

Thanks for the Plymouth link. I'll look into that. You guys have given me some new words to google.

ReaperX7 · 07-30-2014, 04:22 PM

As far as customizations go, fairly much anything really.

I, and others, have swapped out sysvinit for Runit-2.1.1 as an init and service supervision system, and we're developing it into a full-on project.

We did trade eudev for systemd-udev back some time ago, but eudev is back in the book.

So to be accurate... as long as the software will build and compile, it can be added and customized in.