Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Tweaking the BackTrack Start Up menu

Now that we have our operating system up and running as good as a full install, le's tweak the log in process just a bit. The way it's set up by me is that if the USB drive is plugged in when I turn on the computer it automatically boots from that drive. I did that as explained a couple of posts ago. I changed the boot order in the BIOS setup.


So far the log in is not hands free, since we must select the 'Graphics mode with Persistent Changes' item on the start up menu. What a pain. That can be cured.


Open the config file again. (Reminder: It's located in sdb-->boot-->sysconfig-->syslinux.cfg


Find the Group that starts with 'LABEL pchanges'. Select all 5 lines of the group and press Ctrl-x to cut it. Now place the cursor above the line that reads: LABEL kde, and press Ctrl-v to paste it in. Add blanks lines as needed to make it look neat.


Here's a picture of how it should look now:





Okay, one more change to make.


Currently the startup menu waits 20 seconds before automatically choosing the first menu item. If we know we'll usually want the 'Persistent Changes' menu item, why would we want to wait so long. Well, we can choose the item ourselves, but then wouldn't be hands off, would it?

Here's what we can do.

Look at the file you have open in front of you. The second line reads: TIMEOUT 200. This means that the computer will wait 200 tenths of a second, or 20 seconds. let's change it to TIMEOUT 40. That's all, now when we turn on the computer, we can go make a coffee. In a couple of seconds your computer will boot up and save all changes you make. Not bad!!

While we're in the file you may want to change one more thing. When you log in, Backtrack plays this real loud tone. Being that I usually log in at night when my wife and kids are sleeping, it would be pity to wake them. You may like the noise, but if you don't, here's what to do. On that 'APPEND' line we changed earlier add one more thing. after where we added the words changes=/dev/sdb2, add this ' bt nosound' (without the '). Now the line reads:

APPEND vga=0x317 changes=/dev/sdb2 bt nosound initrd.....

The end. Now that we're all set up, I think we're ready to start with the meat.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

This think the line "sdb-->boot-->sysconfig-->sysconfig.cfg" should be "sdb-->boot-->syslinux->>syslinux.cfg" ... right?

Miss Take said...

Yes, you're right. I'm sorry. Thank you very much. I corrected it.

Unknown said...

will that tweak help me to save all the changes and configs that that i make? because now everytime i reboot, it's like a new copy, if i create a file, after i reboot it isnt there anymore.

And i have another problem, when i connect to the internet, everything is fine, i can browse firefox, but as soon as i write 'ifconfig eth0 down' for a moment and then 'if config eth0 up' again, i get a "connection established" notification, but i cant browse the internet(firefox) it always says page cannot be loaded ...

a little help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Miss Take said...

David, yes if you follow all the instructions, it'll save your changes from one startup to the next.
As far as your connection, if you put eth0 down, there is no way you cn stay connected. I am not sure why it says that it's connected, but it's not. Try disconnecting and reconnecting and see what happens.