Refer to initrd(4) for more information about the initial ram disk.
2.
I was trying to limit the bootloader discussion to just GRUB and LILO, but you can see I failed. The mkbootdisk floppy uses SYSLINUX as its bootloader. More information on SYSLINUX (floppy bootloader) and ISOLINUX (CD bootloader) is available at http://syslinux.zytor.com/.
3.
Look at the syslog.conf(5) man page to understand syslog routing. init uses the daemon facility.
4.
The crond file listing was created on a Red Hat 3.0ES system with find /etc/rc.d -name *crond -exec ls -al {} \;
