Chapter 22. Understanding the System Startup and Shutdown Processes
Nowadays, booting an Ubuntu or Kubuntu desktop system involves watching a friendly splash screen display a variety of system status messages and progress bars as it proceeds through the various commands that are part of the boot, initialization, and startup processes. This is all well and good, but sometimes it's nice to know what's actually going on under the hood. It's similarly interesting to know how to cleanly shut down your system when you want to turn it off for a while, and what it does during an orderly shutdown. (Describing what happens when you do a disorderly shutdown by pulling the plug is much easier—poof! The system's off, but the boot process next time will be a tad slower as the system checks for filesystem problems and repairs anything that it has to.)
This chapter describes the general phases of the Linux boot process and any things that are specific to Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux. It then discusses how you can get detailed information about all of the processes executed when your system starts, so that you can look for ways to speed up your system's boot process, and discusses upcoming improvements that will further speed up the boot process in general. The chapter concludes with an explanation of what happens when you shut down your system, ...
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