Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation and Usage by John Goerzen and Ossama Othman (best fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

If you didn’t install LILO on your hard drive, you probably created a boot disk. The boot disk will have LILO on it. All you have to do is insert the disk before you turn on your computer, and the BIOS will find it before it checks the MBR on the hard drive. To return to a non-Linux OS, take out the boot disk and restart the computer. From Linux, be sure you follow the proper procedure for restarting; see section 4.5 on page [*] for details.

LILO loads the Linux kernel from disk and then lets the kernel take over.

(The kernel is the central program of the operating system, which is in control of all other programs.) The kernel discards the BIOS and LILO.

On non-Intel platforms, things work a little differently. But once you boot, everything is more or less the same.

Linux looks at the type of hardware it’s running on. It wants to know what type of hard disks you have, whether or not you have a bus mouse, whether or not you’re on a network, and other bits of trivia like that. Linux can’t remember things between boots, so it has to ask these questions each time it starts up. Luckily, it isn’t asking you these questions - it’s asking the hardware! While it boots, the Linux kernel will print messages on the screen describing what it’s doing.

The query process can cause problems with your system, but if it was going to, it probably would have when you first installed GNU/Linux. If you’re having problems, consult the installation instructions or ask questions on a mailing list.

The kernel merely manages other programs, so once it is satisfied everything is okay, it must start another program to do anything useful.

The program the kernel starts is called init. After the kernel starts init, it never starts another program. The kernel becomes a manager and a provider of services.

Once init is started, it runs a number of scripts (files containing commands), which prepare the system to be used. They do some routine maintenance and start up a lot of programs that do things like display a login prompt, listen for network connections, and keep a log of the computer’s activities.

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