Appendix A: Answers to Exercises

Chapter 1

1.	If you add new hardware to your system, how do you configure it?
2.	When you switch on a computer on which you ve installed a dual-boot system, the boot loader will show you two options to boot into. If you do not choose, it will boot the system into the default choice. How do you change the default choice?

Answers

1.

Fedora comes with Kudzu, a hardware auto-detection and configuration tool, installed by default. Kudzu runs at boot-up and detects changes in the system s hardware configuration. Once it detects new or removed hardware, it gives you the option of configuring the added or removed hardware.

2.

Fedora uses the grub boot-loader. Grub can be configured to specify one of the dual-boot choices to be the default. You need to modify the appropriate configuration file, which in this case is /boot/grub/grub.conf . Here is a typical grub.conf file: # grub.conf generated by anaconda # --TEXT DELETED-- #boot=/dev/hda default=0 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Windows 2000 rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 title Fedora Core (2.6.1-1.65) root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.1-1.65 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.1-1.65.img The default parameter determines which of the two operating systems is the default for booting up. The title sections indicate the two options; you can see a title section for Microsoft Windows and another one for Fedora. The first title option is numbered 0, the second one 1, and so on. Since the default parameter is set to 0 ”that is, the title corresponding to Microsoft Windows ”the system will boot up into Windows if you don t pick one of the choices at boot time. You could change the default parameter to 1, which would cause Fedora to boot up by default. Caution: Be very careful when editing the grub.conf file, as you may render your system unbootable if the file becomes corrupted. Refer to the grub man page for further details on configuring grub.