[SGVLUG] An Interactive Boot in Debian?

[Jess Bermudes via SGVLUG]

It appears that systemd offers some experimental support for this feature.
I say experimental because systemd does not only do things sequentially but
can run things in parallel and thus the dependency graph would have to be
flattened in order to make a feature like this truly work. There is a
systemd option called 'systemd.confirm_spawn' which will ask you questions
for each service if you'd like to execute it or not.

To enable it one time, at the grub menu press E to edit the kernel
parameters. If you have the 'quiet' and 'splash' options there, remove them
so the splash screen graphics don't mess up the text questions. Add the
parameter 'systemd.confirm_spawn=1' to the list of params and then press
Control+X to boot it. You will now be asked a million questions, and in
true quiz show format, there's a timeout. For reasons beyond my paygrade,
systemd assumes yes if you wait too long to answer. I forgot to test how
long the timeout was.

I hope that your screen reader will work for you in that mode. Systemd also
logs all the boot messages and they are viewable once you've finished
booting with the command 'journalctl -b'

There are some other options for debugging systemd's initialization of
processes, as outlined in systemd tutorials such as:
https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging/

Hope this helps!

 - Jess


On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 4:19 PM, Nathan Haines via SGVLUG <sgvlug at sgvlug.net>
wrote:

> On 06/04/2018 04:13 PM, Chime Hart via SGVLUG wrote:
>
>> Thanks Nathan-and-Jes: I have no sysconf file in that dir or anywhere
>> else. Thanks in advance for continuing suggestions.
>>
>
> I was just trying to get everyone in sync with what you were asking.
> Interactive boot isn't as ubiquitous as it used to be.  (And while
> nostalgia misses it--I would use it to tweak my system for playing
> real-mode, 16-bit DOS games--I probably don't miss it any further than I
> actually miss dialing other computer systems with modems.)
>
> I'm excited by Jess's information and am looking forward to playing with
> that later.  :)
>
>
> --
> Nathan Haines
> Ubuntu - https://www.ubuntu.com/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sgvlug.net/pipermail/sgvlug/attachments/20180605/915b9787/attachment-0001.html>