Re: New User/No GUI

[Andrew Cady <d@jerkface.net>]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 07:15:50PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 15 December 2005 18:54, Andrew Cady wrote:
> >Not all distributions even use sysv style init.  It is faulty
> >documentation that assumes any particular runlevel for any particular
> >software.  That is definitely a system-specific issue.  When you see
> >documentation making this mistake please submit a correction to the
> >maintainer.
> 
> Maybe this is the official debian attitude, but for those of us who
> may have a different distro on each machine, it gets damned confusing.
> Yes, debian is different, but this is one area where they really
> should come in out of the cold & rain.  Major things like runlevels vs
> functions could IMO be a lot more standardized, and I feel that debian
> is doing it different just to be debian.

There is no compatibility advantage to standardization here, and
changing the runlevels around would break every Debian system that uses
runlevels at all.  There is also no technical justification for your
preference: it is just preference.  You can easily configure your Debian
system to behave as you like in this respect.

> On any system, it seems to make sense that the cli interface is
> runlevel 3, and the x interface is runlevel 5.

What about a system without X installed?  What if I said network servers
should be in runlevel 5?

> I'm not really sure what runlevels 1,2 & 4 are for unless its to
> be able to customize the system to do what you want that might be
> different from the normal users of 3 & 5.  And no one seems to have
> documented very well, or called it to my attention, the debian methods
> & reasons, its 'just debian'.

All of the runlevels are the same in debian, until you change them,
except 0, 6, and 1, which really are standardized (see init(8)).

By the way runlevel 3 in redhat is NFS mounting.  I.e., runlevel 2
brings up the system including the gettys, then afterwards 3 mounts NFS
and 5 starts xdm.  You can put NFS mounts and xdm in 3 and 5 on debian,
then your systems will all be the same.