[plug] Linux education

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all
Just got back from a week away, and with plenty of time to
play with linux, I did a few things that greatly enhanced my
understanding of how linux works in general.

The first thing I did was port the available software suspend
patches to 2.2.17 (Not a lot of work required there, but it took
some effort for a non C programmer).
Neat, I can now bring up my box to fully operational in 25 seconds,
and take it down in less than 5.
While doing this on my laptop, I found a few peculiarites which caused
init to segfault and effectively not run.

Ever tried to shut down a box without init running ?
So, in a quest to learn the in's and out's of the boot/shutdown
procedure, I booted the system with init=/bin/sh and brought
the full system up by hand, then used it for a while, and then took
it down by hand.
It's a worthwhile exercise to go through if you want to learn more 
about your particular distro's init scripts and how they work.
I learned a bucket load, and I strongly recomend the experience.


-- 
Brad....
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