For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, today I feel like writing down a broad and simplified overview of how modern Linux systems boot. Due to being a sysadmin who has stubbed his toe here repeatedly, I’m going to especially focus on points of failure.
I always find it fascinating to read about how computers boot – it’s often a very intricate process, built atop decades of backwards compatibility.
You take a firm hold on your bootstraps and pull… until you are airborn.
I miss the times when all Linux distros would scroll a list of starting services with [OK] or [FAILED] …it was enchanting
Now we get “aesthetic” boot ~logos.
There’s a charm to seeing the innards of something, whether it’s an OS boot sequence, or the gears in a mechanical pocket watch.
It’s an unsettling authoritarian streak in graphics designers wanting to make everything bland and uniform and shiny.
Adding verbose to my GRUB commandline is one of the first things I do on my systems. (I’m still on a pre-UEFI motherboard)
One of these days, I need to stop being lazy and look up how to get something like my old verbose-mode Gentoo fbsplash theme on modern *buntu.
(I was using something like this: https://leviath4n.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/verbose.png )