At 01:19 AM 12/11/02 -0600, Joseph D. Wagner wrote:
How did you determine this? The copy of Dave's message that I received here, the one that came through this list, does not show any Cc's. If he posted to some kernel list separately, why drag linux-newbie into it at all by cc'ing your reply to *that* message here?> Joseph -- I think you may have gotten this list > mixed up with some other list that you subscribe > to. This list (linux-newbie) is a list for Linux > beginners to ask general questions on, NOT a list > for Linux kernel questions (at least, not exclusively).Yeah, but Dave CC'ed that list too.
How long have you subscribed to linux-newbie? I regularly see here questions that are specific to Red Hat, Slackware, and Debian ... probably SuSE and Mandrake too, though I can't recall any specifically. Also BasicLinux ... its creator even steers his users to this list by name. This all seems very reasonable to me. When you are a beginner, in a sense *all* your questions are specific to the distro you have installed ... at least you don't know enough to know which are distro-specific, which are not ... in fact, I have a bigger problem with the occasional poster who asks a question but does not mention which distro he or she is using.> While I don't know Mandrake so cannot myself answer > Dave's original question, it is hardly inappropriate > for a beginner's list. That's just my point. His question is about a specific distribution of Linux -- Mandrake. That's too specific for this list. I'm not saying it's inappropriate; I'm just saying he'd get a better response from a list specifically designed for Mandrake Linux, rather than posting to a general Linux list.
And the distro-specific lists are (in my, admittedly limited, experience) sometimes populated by people with little patience for beginner-level questions, folks who think "RTFM" is a helpful (or at least an appropriate) reply to a beginner. This list has a fairly long tradition of treating beginners a bit more graciously than I've seen elsewhere.
In fact, I suspect that Dave will learn that his initialization problems are not specific to Mandrake. In that spirit, perhaps a general answer will help him, so ...
... after the kernel is loaded, it starts the "init" process. That process refers to the file /etc/inittab to determine (a) what runlevel to use and (b) what init scripts to run. Typical inittab files have init first start up in single-user mode and run a script listed on the "si" line (Debian example: "si::sysinit:/etc/init.d/rcS"), then switch to the default runlevel and run a script listed on the line for that runlevel (Debian example: "l2:2:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 2" for runlevel 2).
Commonly, each of these scripts is a "wrapper" script that in turn runs a collection of scripts identified by symlinks in a directory specific to that runlevel; in Debian, for example, the single-user script runs all scripts with symlinks having names that begin with "S" in /etc/rcS.d/, then the runlevel-2 script runs all scripts with symlinks having names that begin with "S" in /etc/rc2.d . The details (particularly the directory names) will differ with Mandrake, but it, like every major distro (except maybe Slackware and its derivatives), follows this general procedure closely enough that you (Dave) can probably trace the init sequence by starting at /etc/inittab and seeing what scripts it tells init to run when the system starts up.
Hope this helps. If not, please do post more specific follow-up questions.
--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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