Boot Options (Cheatcodes)

Boot options and cheat codes

Info

This manual page contains tables of

  1. siduction specific parameters (live medium only)
  2. boot options for the graphics server X
  3. general parameters of the Linux kernel
  4. values for the general parameter vga

If the “value” field is non-empty, one of the possible values must be appended to the corresponding boot option with a = character. For example, if “1280x1024” is the desired value for the boot option screen, enter screen=1280x1024 into the Grub command line. For language selection (here German), type lang=de. The Grub command line can be accessed by pressing the e key as soon as the Grub menu appears. After that, you are in edit mode. Now you can navigate to the kernel line with the arrow keys and insert the desired cheatcode(s) at the end. The space character serves as separator. The boot process can be continued with the key combination Ctrl+X or F10.

Detailed reference list for kernel boot codes from kernel.org

siduction specific parameters

These boot options apply only to the live medium.

boot option value description
blacklist module_name temporary deactivation of modules before udev becomes active
desktop kde, gnome, fluxbox select desktop environment
fromiso Please read “booting ‘fromiso’”.
hostname myhostname changes the network name (hostname) of the live CD system
lang be, bg, cz, da, de, de_CH, el, en, en_AU, en_GB, en_IE, es, fr, fr_BE, ga, hr, hu, it, ja, nl, nl_BE, pl, pt (pt_BR), pt_PT, ro, ru, zh sets the language preference, the basic localization settings (locales), the keyboard layout (in the console and in X), the timezone, and the Debian mirror. In the long form lang=ll_cc or lang=ll-cc, “ll” refers to the language selection and “cc” to the keyboard layout, mirror server, and time zone selection (e.g. lang=fr-be ). The default setting for English is en_US with UTC as the time zone and for German de with Europe/Berlin as the time zone. Example for a self-selected setting: lang=pt_PT tz=Pacific/Auckland
md5sum tests the checksum of the live medium
noaptlang prevents the installation of localization packages of the selected language
nocpufreq does not enable speedstep/powernow
nodhcp no DHCP (DHCP automatically tries to establish Ethernet connections)
noeject does not remove CD/DVD from drive
nofstab prevents writing a new fstab
nointro skips the output of index.html when starting the live medium
nomodeset radeon.modeset=0 together with xmodule=vesa allows a clean boot to X for Radeon cards in live mode
nonetwork prevents automatic configuration of network interfaces at boot time
noswap no activation of the swap partition
smouse searches for serial mouse input devices using hwinfo
tz tz=Europe/Dublin sets the time zone. If the bios or hardware clock is set to UTC, utc=yes is specified. A list of all supported time zones can be viewed by copying & pasting file:///usr/share/zoneinfo/ into the browser.
toram copies the medium into RAM and boots from the RAM copy

Boot options for the graphics server X

Either the xandr or xmodule boot option should also be used when applying boot options for the X graphics server for Radeon, Intel, or MGA graphics cards.

boot option value description
dpi auto or DPI count sets the desired pixels per inch for the monitor. The DPI is obtained by dividing the number of pixels of the monitor width by the diagonal (in inch) and multiplying the result by one of the following values: 1.25 for a 4:3 screen, 1.18 for a 16:10 screen, or 1.147 for a 16:9 screen. For a 24” screen with 1920x1080 resolution this results in 1.147x1920/24 dpi=92, or for a 15” screen with 1600x1200 resolution this results in 1.25x1600/15 dpi=133.
hsync 80 sets the horizontal frequency of the monitor (in kilohertz)
noml prevents the X.org configuration from containing a list of modelines, thus causing the correct mode to be detected automatically
noxrandr prevents the new X.org drivers from using the extensions of RandR 1.2 and uses the old techniques to query monitor properties
screen 1280x1024 sets custom resolution for X (1280x1024 or other screen resolutions)
vsync (e.g.) 60 sets the vertical frequency of the monitor (in hertz)
xdepth values: 8 15 16 24 set the color depth used by X.org (not all drivers support 1 and 4)
keytable (e.g.) us, de, gb keyboard layout used by X.org
xkbmodel (e.g.) pc105 keyboard type used by X.org (the number indicates the number of keys)
xkboptions (e.g.) grp:alt_shift_toggle assignment variant of the keyboard used by X.org
xkbvariant (e.g.) nodeadkeys set a layout variant of the keyboard
xmode 800x600 set the screen resolution according to the given value (1024x768, 1600x1200 etc.)
xmodule or xdriver ati, fbdev, i810, intel, mga, nouveau, radeon, savage, vesa uses the selected X module
xrandr forces X.org configuration using the new RandR 1.2 extensions of the X.org drivers
xrate XX forces a preferred retry frequency for drivers supported by RandR 1.2. This option must be used in conjunction with the xmode boot option. Detailed documentation can be found here.
xhrefresh (e.g.) 75 sets the horizontal frequency of the monitor for X (in kilohertz)
xvrefresh (e.g.) 60 sets the vertical frequency of the monitor for X (in hertz)

General parameters of the Linux kernel

boot option value description
apm off disables Advanced Power Managment
1, 3, 5 (e.g.) 3 boot targets or runlevels which can be entered manually in the Grub boot line. See also the manual page Runlevel - target unit.
irqpoll uses IRQ polling
mem (e.g.) 128M, 1G uses the specified memory size
noagp no AGP support (Accelerated Graphics Port)
noapic no APIC query (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller)
nodma no support for DMA (Direct Memory Access)
noisapnpbios does not perform an ISA “Plug and Play” query at startup
nomce disables the kernel option “Machine Check Exception”
nosmp does not use Symmetric Multi-Processor (multiple CPUs or CPUs with Hyper-Threading)
pci noacpi no ACPI for PCI devices
quiet no output on screen
vga normal more about vga codes in the next paragraph
video (e.g.) DVI-0:800x600 for graphics cards with KMS enabled; applies to Intel and ATI graphics cards (the latter with Radeon driver); DVI-X/LVDS-X refers to video output shown by xrandr

VGA codes

The following tables list the values that can be specified with the general parameter vga.
An example of use is vga=791 (VESA code, resolution 1024x768 with 64000 colors).

Problems with netbooks or other screen resolutions can be solved by entering vga=0 in the grub line.

Decimal

colors 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024
256 257 259 261 263
32k 272 275 278 281
64k 273 276 279 282
16M 274 277 280

hexadecimal

colors 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024
256 0x101 0x103 0x105 0x107
32k 0x110 0x113 0x116 0x119
64k 0x111 0x114 0x117 0x11A
16M 0x112 0x115 0x118

VESA

colors 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
256 769 771 773 775 796
32k 784 787 790 793 797
64k 785 788 791 794 798
16M 786 789 792 795
Last edited: 2023/11/10