Since I can't post in the FAQ forum:

With Red Hat based distros (RHEL/FC) and Debian you can achieve the same effect as with Gentoo or SuSE's etc/init.d/boot.local (actually symlink to this file) with the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local

In fact it would be a good idea to have the echo commands into a separate script file which gets called from this script file, so any user would only have to update the actual script to add echo calls with two main advantages:

1.- A clean layout of the rc.local file
2.- The actual script may be made by a user and as such root access to the file would not be necessary to make the changes (yes, this can also mean a security hole, I know, but great for linux newbs).