Booting linux single user.

This is pretty simple in essence, you just put the word "single" onto the linux boot line. If you are using grub for a boot loader, just elect to edit the kernel boot line and add the word "single" to the end of all the other junk being passed to the kernel.

I found this incredibly useful when using a live or rescue CD with an ancient VGA monitor. A fringe benefit is that it makes things a lot faster. The main benefit is that you don't have to get an X server with video modes set up for some funky monitor.

What I was eager to do (and now we wander away from the main subject) was to look at what was on the PCI bus and how it was configured. To do this, I used the fedora 7 live CD and used to be able to edit the command line, added single, let it boot (ending up with a single user shell). Not messing with the other kernel boot line arguments meant that I had a root filesystem, and things like more and vi were available to me.

The lspci utility was just what the doctor ordered, and has a nice man page in section 8. The stuff in /proc/bus/pci is pretty much inscrutible, so lspci allows a nice way to look at it. (Very nice, thank you!).