August 2021
Intermediate to advanced
542 pages
11h 16m
English
Content preview from Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 2. Managing the GRUB Bootloader
The bootloader is the software that loads your operating system after you power up your computer. The GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) bootloader is the most commonly used bootloader on Linux.
GRUB supports a number of useful features: boot multiple operating systems on a single PC, live configuration editing, themeable interface, and rescue modes. In this chapter you will learn about all of these.
GRUB versus GRUB 2
There are two major GRUB releases, legacy GRUB and GRUB 2. GRUB 2 is version 1.99 and up. Legacy GRUB ended at version 0.97 in 2005. A lot of GRUB how-tos still reference legacy GRUB and compare it with GRUB 2. In this chapter I’m not going to talk about legacy GRUB. It’s been retired for a long time and has little relevance to using GRUB 2, so this chapter will focus exclusively on GRUB 2.
Some Linux distros use plain GRUB naming, some use GRUB 2. For example, Ubuntu has the /boot/grub/ directory and grub-mkconfig command, and Fedora calls them /boot/grub2/ and grub2-mkconfig. Check your filepaths and names. In this chapter I use the Ubuntu naming scheme, except in distro-specific examples.
Starting a computer hasn’t changed all that much since UNIVAC was first built, back in the 1940s in the last millennium. Starting a computer is called bootstrapping, a reference to “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” which is impossible. The difficulty with a programmable computer is it needs software instructions to tell it what ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.