[takapa]

Hello,

I'm a Linux newbie and wanted to understand the boot sequence of the XBMC Live installation.

I think that GRUB boots up with root permissions and starts up the Ubuntu OS, then it autostarts a script in the xbmc users folder somewhere (which loads the xbmc-standalone executable).

I wish to understand what is executed after the grub section as I wish to change the startup parameters of XBMC. I also don't like to be in the dark with the OSs that I use. I did some searching online but it just referenced the "/etc/rc.local" file is executed (which doesn't seem to do anything in my case (just exit 0).

Thanks,

Takapa

menu.lst configured as follows:

title XBMC Live 9.11 (Camelot, Ubuntu 9.10)
uuid 12aa21ae-24bd-4672-b727-76303c6fa9b4
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic root=UUID=12aa21ae-24bd-4672-b727-76303c6fa9b4 ro quiet splash xbmc=autostart,nodisk
mount,setvolume loglevel=0
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-16-generic
quiet

[ascent1729]

It is true that the XBMC Live system runs a script at startup in order to start the system up, but Linux has better ways of allowing a script to run at startup than dumping it into the /etc/rc.local file, which is really only a place to put miscellaneous commands. XBMC Live (and the other system services/daemons) are generally run at startup by what is known as an init daemon, which is the first process run by the kernel at startup. The modern init daemon in Ubuntu is called Upstart, and its configuration files (which are really startup scripts, except that they can't be run directly, but have to be run by the command "service PROGRAM start") are located in /etc/init (other scripts that can actually be executed, for compatibility with the traditional method of writing startup scripts, can be found in /etc/init.d/).

When XBMC Live boots, XBMC is started by an Upstart script located in /etc/init/xbmc-live.conf. This script has access to the startup parameters of XBMC given on the kernel command line in GRUB, and it performs various configurations (including, among many, generating a new xorg.conf X configuration file, turning all the sound volumes in ALSA to the max, to prevent them being muted, and so on). If you look for the options by searching for /tmp/xbmcliveParams in /etc/init/xbmc-live.conf, you can see what they do (assuming you know Bash scripting language). Afterwards, after configuring the home directory of the xbmc user, the script /usr/bin/runXBMC is run, which does the rest of the work.