Startup & System Settings

Since we felt like we were “starting from scratch” and we really wanted to make a system where everything just made sense for us, we also took the time to rethink the boot scripts. I felt the two historical models (System V and BSD) were overkill for our common desktop-machine setup. GoboLinux uses a simpler system: two scripts, Init and Done, do most of the job. Additional scripts, such as Multi and Single, take care of the runlevels. These files are simply sequences of commands, prepended by the word Exec and a message string. Here’s an excerpt of Init:

Exec "Setting clock..." SetClock
Exec "Loading keymap..." loadkeys "$KeymapLayout"
Exec "Bringing up the loopback interface..." ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1

More elaborate tasks such as SetClock are defined as shell functions in a Tasks file (these tasks can also be called from the command-line using the RunTask script). Configurable settings are defined as environment variables in the Options file. The wrapper function Exec allows for a nifty additional feature: boot themes. The boot sequence can look Slackware-like (with the standard error/output messages), RedHat-like (with lots of OK’s), or GoboLinux-like (the latter uses a modified version of the Linux Progress Patch).

— Hisham Muhammad, 2003. Excerpt from “The Unix tree rethought: an introduction to GoboLinux”.