I'm asking myself if I can use Grub 2 to tell the Operating System which actions to perform after boot.
Background:
I have a HTPC with Debian Wheezy installed. Sometimes I want to use the System as a regular desktop but sometimes I'd just like to have XBMC started.
I tried out a dual boot with OpenElec which wasn't very convenient because I was not able to mount my RAID-1 in OpenElec.
My next attempt would be to use a second minimal Debian installation with XBMC. With this solution I could still choose between regular desktop and HTPC purpose in Grub.
But now I thought this could be a waste of time and disk space, as I have Debian already installed. It would be easier if there was some kind of boot parameter I could use to tell my regular Debian installation
- "Boot to desktop" or
- "Boot to XBMC"
Then I would just need a second entry in Grub to handle this boot parameter.
Is this somehow possible?
Best Answer
Any command line parameter to the Linux kernel will show up in
/proc/cmdline
. You can put anything you like in there (as long it's not a parameter recognised by the kernel or any of the drivers or the initrd system). For instance, you could build it up with fancy grub menus, and then use that in a startup script like/etc/rc.local
to decide what to do with it.For instance add a
/etc/grub.d/09-xcmd
with:Then add to
/etc/default/grub
:Run
update-grub
.In
/etc/rc.local
, you could have:And in your
~/.xinitrc
: