Hi

 

I have been looking for documentation on the available boot options or "cheat codes" when booting Linux There appear to be variations, based on the distro being used at the time. Does anyone know where to find documentation on boot options that are distro independent and / or boot options for Puppy, PCLinuxOS and Zenwalk?

 

TIA

the boot options would depend on what boot loader is in use (to load the kernel), in the old days it was just lilo but nowadays it's mostly grub (GNU GRand Unified Bootloader)

 

from Wiki

 

Quote:From the GRUB prompt a user can manually select and control booting from any installed operating system by using bash-like commands. To boot an operating system automatically, the appropriate commands are placed in a configuration file named "menu.lst" in a designated subdirectory. 

GRUB has a rich set of terminal commands that allow a user at the GRUB prompt to view the hard disk partition details, alter partition settings, temporarily re-map the disk order, boot any user-defined configuration file and view the configuration of other boot loaders in file formats GRUB supports. Thus, without prior knowledge of what is installed on a computer, one can use GRUB from an external device such as a floppy disk, USB device or a CD-ROM to boot up an installed operating system.

 

GRUB uses a scrollable screen for operating system boot selection. This means 150 or more boot choices can be easily controlled by GRUB by adding them to the "menu.lst" configuration file. The arrow keys are used to select which operating system to boot.

 

as for keystrokes normally the grub menu informs you of whats available, why do you need them as a matter of interest ?