Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Tip #7: Changing Your Boot Environment “Permanently”

The word permanently is in quotes in the heading because you can, of course, go back and change this setting later, if you want. Permanently just refers to the fact that after you have made this change, every time you boot the system, it automatically goes into the preferred environment until you change it.

You can’t make this change in Linspire, Ubuntu, or Xandros unless you want to boot into single-user mode, which is basically “safe mode” and not of much use. Well, okay, you can make the change, but you would need a techie friend to set up a bunch of stuff for you. Linspire and Xandros assume that you don’t want to do this. You can’t do this in Knoppix either, but then it’s a LiveCD so you won’t be doing anything permanent to it.

To make this change in Fedora, Mandriva, or SuSE, you need to edit what’s called a run level. Fortunately, all three of these distributions use the same run level settings, so the instructions are the same for all of them:

1.	In the GUI, open a command line terminal. If you’re not sure how to do so, see Chapter 6. If you’re not in the GUI and you’re already logged in, type su - to become the root user.
2.	Type cp/etc/inittab/etc/inittab.old to make a backup. Now, if something happens while you’re editing the inittab file, you can always restart fresh with the old version.
3.	Open the inittab file ...