Mandrake - The boot process

Mandrake's boot process is quite similar to the one used on RedHat systems.

Linux Loader
Grub is the default choice and standard is the place of its configuration files: /boot/grub/

Kernel
As in RedHat Fedora, the kernel image, the system map, the configuration file and the initrd are placed in /boot, with the version name appended to each file. Modules are placed in /lib/modules

Init
/etc/inittab is practically the same of Fedora, with runlevel 1 dedicated to single user emergency mode, runlevel 3 for multiuser, networked mode and runlevel 5 with X11 graphical environment.
The /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit script that brings up the system is very similar to RedHat's one. Both are based on the initscripts package and derive from the old bcheckrc Unix script that used to mount the system partitions at boot times.
Now rc.sysinit does much more that and sets up a whole system with configuration data largely obtained from the files in /etc/sysconfig. A detailed list of the various oprions available for the sysconfig files is in the sysconfig.txt text placed in the documentation directory of the initscripts packages (for example, on Mandrake 10, /usr/share/doc/initscripts-7.06/sysconfig.txt.
Worth noting is the management, in Mandrake's version of rc.sysinit, of encrypted swap space and file systems.

Services
As usual it's possibile to manage service using the scripts in /etc/init.d or, as in RedHat, using the service command.

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