When setting up a dual-boot computer or even simply a new Windows computer: 1. Have a Linux Live CD/DVD/USB handy. It’s almost guaranteed that you will need it even if you’re only installing windows. 2. Save the MBR (“Master Boot Record”): Boot your Live linux and in the terminal type: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/some/path/your-mbr-backup-file bs=512 […]
1. Examine /boot/grub/grub.cfg to find out the boot order of your multiboot system or just remember the order of your boot options as they appear during boot.l Count which one is windows (counting is 0-based, i.e. the default boot option is 0, next one is 1, etc). 2. Edit /etc/default/grub. You need to be logged […]
Making an embedded system boot up properly can be quite a hurdle sometimes. Among the various problems you might encounter, those related to your root filesystem are some of the most common ones I have seen and among those a very frequent problem is not being akle to acquire an initial console/terminal. These boot problems […]
How can we remove the unused linux kernels and at the same time have our boot configuration (grub’s entries in the grub cfg menu) updated? First we want to list all the kernel-related packages, like linux-image and linux-headers, linux-generic, etc: $ dpkg -l linux-* On my 10.04 Ubuntu system the above command results in the […]
For those of you wondering how to make Fedora Linux boot into text mode – here’s how to disable the graphics boot/login screen: If you are running an older distribution you need to edit the file /etc/inittab (must be root) and change id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault: If you are running a NEWER distribution can […]
PROBLEM: The Linux init process gets an error that looks like this (in the stderr output): INIT: cannot execute “/etc/init.d/rc” Several things may cause this error but in my case it was happening because the rc script had #! /bin/sh on the first line, and /bin/sh was missing. SOLUTION: In /bin provide a link called […]