Part II Starting Up and Configuring Your System: Explaining the Boot Process
Christine Bresnahan, Richard Blum · 2019
This chapter examines the boot and startup processes in Linux systems; and also discusses the Linux initialization process, showing how Linux decides which background applications to start at bootup. When you turn on the power to your Linux system, it triggers a series of events that eventually leads to the login prompt. Normally you don't worry about what happens behind the scenes of those events; you just log in and start using your applications. However, there may be times when your Linux system doesn't boot quite correctly, or perhaps an application you expected to be running in background mode isn't. In those cases, it helps to have a basic understanding of just how Linux boots the operating system and starts programs so you can troubleshoot the problem. The BIOS firmware had a simplistic menu interface that allowed you to change some settings to control how the system found hardware and define what device the BIOS should use to start the operating system.