Tags: How to install Burg and Super boot manager on Linux Mint13/14 Created: 4 years ago. Last edited: 4 years ago. Reviewed: 4 years ago. Read 0 times.

Want to start, stop, and manage services on your Linux box? Then you need to familiarize yourself with Upstart and take control of your startup and boot processes on Linux. When Linux boots up, the first process that runs is called init. From there, init takes the task of starting up system processes. But which init? Turns out, there are several flavors of init, and it depends on which Linux distribution you're using and how modern the release is. Let's take a look at some of the backstory.

BSD, System V, Upstart and systemd init, Oh My. You might think that the way that the system starts would be fairly well-agreed upon between Linux distributions. Unfortunately, that's not been the case and may not be the case for some time.

Related Tutorials on Linux.com • • • • • Linux isn't directly derived from UNIX, but it takes a lot of ideas from UNIX, including the way that the system starts. Some Linux distros, most notably Slackware, used the init. Slackware (and its derivatives) is the lone holdout for this style these days, and it includes a workaround so that applications that expect to support System V init scripts can install them normally. System V (from UNIX System V), the precursor to was the standard for most Linux distros for many years. Distros using SysV init would have several directories under /etc such as rc0.d, rc1.d, through rc6.d for each runlevel — though many of the runlevels are not really implemented. Btd5 Deluxe Serial Key Generator Download on this page. What's a runlevel, you ask? Essentially this is the grouping of services that are run by init.

For example, runlevel 0 is 'halt,' runlevel 1 or S are the 'single user mode,' and runlevel 6 is reboot. On Fedora/Red Hat systems, runlevel 3 is a full set of services to run a multiuser system (networking, etc.), and runlevel 5 includes multiuser services and X11 with the display manager. You'll notice I didn't mention 2 or 4, because those runlevels are rarely used and runlevel 4 isn't even defined by default. Note that you can switch between runlevels using the telinit command, like so: telinit 3 would switch to runlevel 3, and telinit 6 would tell the system to reboot. Note that you would usually want to just use reboot instead to reboot, but telinit 6 would also work.

Under each of the directories, you'd have a set of symbolic links that point back to scripts that include startup and shutdown directives for services like Apache and the SSH daemon. Each link has a name like K NNsshd or S NNcups, where the NN determines the order in which services are killed (K) or started (S). This became tricky with laptops and mobile systems, because the state of a computer might determine the order in which services should be started. See the for Upstart by Scott James Remnant for more detail — but the short of it is that the SysV style init that served Linux well for many years became rather fragile and creaky when Linux adapted to use as a notebook OS as much as a server OS. So now we have, or had, Upstart as the emerging standard. For now, Upstart is the sort-of standard for several distros. Iso 5801 Industrial Fans Performance Testing.

Upstart is used by Ubuntu, current Fedora releases, and openSUSE 11.3 includes it as an optional package. Guitar Chord Buster Pro 4.4(serial) more. But the Fedora folks are working on a replacement for Upstart called, which is a 'system and session manager' that is meant to be a 'drop-in replacement for sysvinit.' There's a of the rationale behind systemd by Lennart Poettering that is an interesting read if you're interested in the deep details. So at some point, you'll need to know Upstart or systemd, or both if you are managing systems using Upstart and systemd.

For now, we're going to look at Upstart. Managing Startup Services Now, when we're talking about startup services, I mean the system-wide services like SSH and Apache, not the applications started up by your desktop. That's a whole different kettle of fish, and depends on the desktop that you're using. For example, if you're running a recent Linux distro with GNOME, you'll look at System ->Preferences ->Startup Applications. For applications managed with Upstart, you'll first want to look at the initctl command. This allows you to work with Upstart's init daemon. Naturally, you're going to need to use sudo to run initctl or be logged in as root.