A login shell is the first process that executes under your user ID when you log in for an interactive session. The login process tells the shell to behave as a login shell with a convention: passing argument 0, which is normally the name of the shell executable, with a - character prepended (e.g. -bash whereas it would normally be bash. Login shells typically read a file that does things like setting environment variables: /etc/profile and ~/.profile for the traditional Bourne shell, ~/.bash_profile additionally for bash†, /etc/zprofile and ~/.zprofile for zsh†, /etc/csh.login and ~/.login for csh, etc.
When you log in on a text console, or through SSH, or with su -, you get an interactive login shell. When you log in in graphical mode (on an X display manager), you don't get a login shell, instead you get a session manager or a window manager.
It's rare to run a non-interactive login shell, but some X settings do that when you log in with a display manager, so as to arrange to read the profile files. Other settings (this depends on the distribution and on the display manager) read /etc/profile and ~/.profile explicitly, or don't read them. Another way to get a non-interactive login shell is to log in remotely with a command passed through standard input which is not a terminal, e.g. ssh example.com <my-script-which-is-stored-locally (as opposed to ssh example.com my-script-which-is-on-the-remote-machine, which runs a non-interactive, non-login shell).
When you start a shell in a terminal in an existing session (screen, X terminal, Emacs terminal buffer, a shell inside another, etc.), you get an interactive, non-login shell. That shell might read a shell configuration file (~/.bashrc for bash invoked as bash, /etc/zshrc and ~/.zshrc for zsh, /etc/csh.cshrc and ~/.cshrc for csh, the file indicated by the ENV variable for POSIX/XSI-compliant shells such as dash, ksh, and bash when invoked as sh, $ENV if set and ~/.mkshrc for mksh, etc.).
When a shell runs a script or a command passed on its command line, it's a non-interactive, non-login shell. Such shells run all the time: it's very common that when a program calls another program, it really runs a tiny script in a shell to invoke that other program. Some shells read a startup file in this case (bash runs the file indicated by the BASH_ENV variable, zsh runs /etc/zshenv and ~/.zshenv), but this is risky: the shell can be invoked in all sorts of contexts, and there's hardly anything you can do that might not break something.
† I'm simplifying a little, see the manual for the gory details.
Best Answer
The extra options in grub on the
kernelline are in fact kernel boot options passed across to the kernel when loaded.So if you are referring to appending
textto the grub line in Ubuntu, then the same config should be able to be used for mint and passed to the kernel by Yaboot.It looks like Yaboot supports an
append=option