Booting: the Traditional View

The way Knoppix boots is not that different from any other Linux distribution. The BIOS loads the bootloader isolinux from the CD-ROM and turns control over to it. Isolinux locates and loads the Linux kernel and then mounts the initial ramdisk, miniroot, which contains the boot script /linuxrc. /linuxrc does all the heavy lifting by mounting the compressed system image on the CD and doing the primary hardware probing and setup.

Once /linuxrc finishes, it hands control over to /etc/init, which reads and parses /etc/inittab. With the default boot options, /etc/init runs the initial startup scripts in /etc/rc*, which tend to be soft links to files in /etc/init.d/. The most notable startup script is /etc/init.d/knoppixautoconfig, which further probes and configures the system's hardware. When it finishes, init enters runlevel 5 and runs the script /etc/init.d/xsession, which starts X11 (the graphical user interface) with the KDE Desktop. (Runlevels are explained later in this appendix.)