Booting Strapping

When you boot your PC, you are (greeted by the BIOS (or EFI)), and then by your bootloader, which in turn boots the OS.

This should be true for most systems, and it's true for Linux, our main focus.

I completely forgot about this, and just placed my distro in a USB stick, and booted from it. To surprise to me, the BIOS told me that no OS was found. I had to find a way or another to boot my system.

My first though was GRUB, of which I didn't knew had two versions, I went with the second, as it was "better" or something. But as I said in “Starting fast, progressing slowly”, that didn't work.

My best bet was to compile it myself, due to Debian's being too Debian related (as almost everything there is), and I was greeted with a good build. Untill I actually went to use it.

I used arch-chroot due to it working with the install method of GRUB, but then I found... a kernel panic with the initramfs.

I keep forgetting, but I don't believe it's mainly my fault, as many distros don't talk about these things (except LFS, but that's advanced). So I went to create the initramfs image, but the LFS script failed, the mkinitramfs from debian failed, and well, Arch32 has been having problems for a long time (I can't seem to be able to download software from them with my browser).

So I'm turning over to Syslinux. It doesn't require the initramfs, and apparently also supports EFI. I'll proceed in a later post.