Re: LSB specification of runlevels
On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 09:07:29AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> This was discussed, but apparently there a number of Linux books
> already published which talk about using telinit 5 to enable X. So
> while there was some appeal to changing runlevel 5 to synchronize with
> the rest of the world had some appeal, Alan Cox argued that to do so
> would violate the principle of least surprise for novice users in a
> very nasty way.
Books that learn people that "telinit 5" starts X11, imho deserve to
be obsolete. In my book, "/etc/init.d/xdm {start,stop,restart}" is
the preferred interface to manually intervene in the running of xdm.
Runlevels are arbitrary in this context. As to the principle of least
surprise, are you absolutely sure that it is not in fact the lsb, that
is creating surprises here?
If you generally don't want to run xdm, but still want to have it
installed and available for specific uses or just in case, simply
remove the /etc/rc?.d/S*xdm symlinks. That way, xdm will not be
started automatically. If you even only casually want to run x on your
very personal laptop anyway, why install fancy stuff like xdm at all?
Just login and type "startx" if and when you need it.
Cheers,
Joost
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