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资源说明：1 Introduction to GRUB
1.1 Overview
Briefly, a boot loader is the first software program that runs when a computer starts. It
is responsible for loading and transferring control to an operating system kernel software
(such as Linux or GNU Mach). The kernel, in turn, initializes the rest of the operating
system (e.g. a GNU system).
GNU GRUB is a very powerful boot loader, which can load a wide variety of free
operating systems, as well as proprietary operating systems with chain-loading1. GRUB
is designed to address the complexity of booting a personal computer; both the program
and this manual are tightly bound to that computer platform, although porting to other
platforms may be addressed in the future.
One of the important features in GRUB is flexibility; GRUB understands filesystems
and kernel executable formats, so you can load an arbitrary operating system the way you
like, without recording the physical position of your kernel on the disk. Thus you can load
the kernel just by specifying its file name and the drive and partition where the kernel
resides.
When booting with GRUB, you can use either a command-line interface (see
Section 12.1 [Command-line interface], page 43), or a menu interface (see Section 12.2
[Menu interface], page 44). Using the command-line interface, you type the drive
specification and file name of the kernel manually. In the menu interface, you just select
an OS using the arrow keys. The menu is based on a configuration file which you prepare
beforehand (see Chapter 5 [Configuration], page 17). While in the menu, you can switch
to the command-line mode, and vice-versa. You can even edit menu entries before using
them.
In the following chapters, you will learn how to specify a drive, a partition, and a
file name (see Chapter 2 [Naming convention], page 7) to GRUB, how to install GRUB on
your drive (see Chapter 3 [Installation], page 9), and how to boot your OSes (see Chapter 4
[Booting], page 13), step by step.
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