Customising Incognito boot process

Sylvester · 07-04-2009, 09:25 PM

I have just managed to streamline the boot process for my Incognito-on-a-thumbdrive, so I will share it in case it may be useful to someone.

It saves a couple of key presses per boot, and sorts out video problems I was having on my netbook, being 1024x600.

I replace /syslinux/syslinux.cfg with the following:

Code:

PROMPT 0
DEFAULT linux
LABEL linux
SAY Now booting the kernel from SYSLINUX...
KERNEL gentoo
APPEND root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc 
APPEND looptype=squashfs loop=/image.squashfs cdroot initrd=gentoo.igz vga=normal splash=silent,theme:incognito-2008.1 CONSOLE=/dev/tty1 acpi=on dopcmcia lang=en keymap=uk macchanger

interesting points:
vga=normal - this fixes boot-time video problems I was getting
macchanger - this apparently randomiser the MAC address your network card(s) report(s).

I'm curious to know what happens when I turn the computer on. Straight away I press escape, and select the USB thumb drive.

What happens next? how does the computer know what to do next? what file does it look for on the thumbdrive? somehow it ends up processing the sysLinux.cfg

it seems very fascinating and mysterious

Sy

anonym · 07-05-2009, 06:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sylvester

What happens next? how does the computer know what to do next? what file does it look for on the thumbdrive? somehow it ends up processing the sysLinux.cfg

This doesn't differ in any significant way from what happens when you boot your nomarl operating system, Windows or whatever that might be. When a storage device has been selected for boot, its boot sector is scanned for a bootloader, which in Incognito's case is SYSLINUX. If a bootloader (or any executable code really) is present it is executed. SYSLINUX knows how the FAT32 filesystem (used on the USB drive) works and has been told where to find the configuration file (that is specified when installing SYSLINUX), so when run it'll do as instructed by that file, presenting the menu, loading a kernel etc.