On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> Besides the BSD's, are there any Linux distros _NOT_ based on
> Slackware that use the BSD-style init scripts? The BSD-style of init
> scripts is one of my chief reasons for using Slackware.
>
> Most distros use SysV, and by default turn on a lot of services that I
> don't need or want. Except for Mandrake or PCLOS, which make it easy
> to turn off unneeded services, I find it confusing and hard to turn
> off services in a SysV system. I like Mepis and Ubuntu, but because
> they're Debian-based they use SysV-style init scripts and I can't
> figure out how to turn off unneeded services.
I used to be a Slackware user from around 1994 - 1999. I wanted to check
out other distributions, but I also found the SysV init process strange
after so much Slackware time. However, once I poked around at it, I
actually learned to love SysV init, and still do today as a Debian user.
SysV is really quite simple once you understand the basic process of
runlevels (which are also present in BSD-style init, but just more
"hidden"). Do a "man init" will give you a good idea. Basically, a
crash-course would be:
* There are several run levels your system can be in.
* Run level 0 is for halt (shutdown), 1 is for booting up the system, and
6 is for rebooting. There is also run level "S" (or "s" - they are the
same) which is also used for inital bootup into single-user mode. All
of these run levels are considered "reserved" and you probably will not
need to know much more about them unless you really want to dig into it.
* On most Linux systems, run level 2 is multi-user mode, console only (no
GUI). Great for servers. Run level 5 is multi-user mode with a GUI
(launching X11 automatically on boot-up). Your system is likely in one of
these two run levels.
* To find out which run level your system is in, you could do the geeky
thing and examine /etc/inittab, or you could just run the "runlevel"
command with no arguments.
Now, back to SysV init... There will be one big /etc/init.d/
directory containing all of the start/stop scripts for various
services. Yes, there should be a ton of stuff in there. There will
also be several /etc/rc<N>.d/ directories, where "<N>" is a run level
number. Inside /etc/rc<N>.d/ will just be some symlinks to stuff that the
system should run when entering or exiting that particular run level. It
is actually quite organized.
If, for example, you are in run level 5 and do not want sendmail to launch
on boot, just remove the /etc/rc5.d/S21sendmail symlink. Likewise, if you
do want sendmail to launch on boot, just "ln -s /etc/init.d/sendmail
/etc/rc5.d/S21sendmail" - that is it.
It may sound confusing, but hop on a SysV init based system and tinker
with it for a few minutes. You will find that it actually makes a little
sense. :)
--
~Jay
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