Reordering the boot for fun and profit [LWN.net]

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 0:33 UTC (Fri) by sholdowa (guest, #34811)
In reply to: Reordering the boot for fun and profit by AJWM
Parent article: Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Level 4 was originally graphical without networking. However, that's pretty useless anyway,
and involved turning the networking from level 3 off, so nobody ever used it.

This is the only thing that I just can't understand why debian has to screw it up, and use
level 2 for everything, graphical or no.

As for the sequencing, it's not really rocket science - it's alphabetical! Originally the
numbering was such that the Kill script + Startup script = 100 ( or 1000 if you used HP-UX ).
That way, the services were stopped in the reverse order of startup, so there's no problem.

eg S80apache and K20apache, S81tomcat and K19tomcat

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Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 7:59 UTC (Fri) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link]

I think the Debian approach is to hide the archaic concept of runlevels and avoid this
0,6,1,2,3,4,5 confusion altogether.

There are facilities for shutting down, rebooting, booting in rescue mode, and [re]starting
the GUI. Joe User doesn't need to be introduced to this wacky concept of runlevels.

(But he does need to know which display manager is the right one.)

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 20:59 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

This is the only thing that I just can't understand why debian has to screw it up, and use level 2 for everything, graphical or no.

Because when this decided, many years ago, there was no consensus on what belonged in the various run-levels, nor what the default should be. To avoid ongoing flame wars, we decided to just make them all the same, and let the user adjust as desired. This actually works pretty well, since most users don't have any real use for anything between "single-user" and "everything". The growth of wireless and portables has, since then, made such distinctions more interesting, but even then the useful distinction is not "network/no-network" but "which network am I connected to", which runlevels don't directly solve.