Make boot options permanent
[Note: This tip is recommended for advanced users only. None of these options should be used unless you already know what they mean and have some idea what their impact might be.]
If your machine includes some sort of funky hardware that makes BeOS unhappy, you may need to enter the boot options menu (press the Spacebar when the bootloader appears) and select Safe mode, disable SMP, Don’t call the BIOS, or even debug mode. If it turns out that you need to invoke one of these options every time you boot (which is rare), you can make these options permanent.
In R4.5, look in /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/sample
and you’ll find the following files:
ata.sample atapi.sample awe64 kernel.sample vesa.sample
Each of them includes various options relating to dozens of boot-time parameters. You should be able to determine what each of them do by opening them in a text editor and poking around. If you want to activate one of the options in these files, copy it to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers
and uncomment (remove the „#“) any lines you want to activate.
kernel.sample includes options mirroring the choices shown in the boot options menu, while the others will let you configure specific sound card settings, set vesa modes for graphics cards, and set advanced options for ATA and ATAPI devices.
You can also use the virtual_memory file to establish a swap file of a smaller or larger size than the GUI Virtual Memory preferences panel will allow. Note that setting your swap file to a lower size than recommended will probably impact performance, and is not recommended.