Runlevels

Runlevels is one of those things that struck me when first using Linux as a bit weird, only later to discover in life that it's one of those over engineered elements from UNIX that one just ends up ignoring instead of doing anything about it.

Runlevels:
0    Halt
1(S)       Single-user
2    Not used
3    Multi-user
4    Not used
5    X11
6    Reboot

In /etc/inittab I actually bother to use runlevel 5, like so:

x:5:once:/bin/su - -- hendry -l -c '/usr/bin/startx </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1'

To boot into runlevel 5, you need to append '5' to your Linux boot /proc/cmdline, like so in my /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg:

# (0) Arch Linux
LABEL arch
	MENU LABEL Arch Linux
	LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
	APPEND root=/dev/sdb1 ro 5
	INITRD ../initramfs-linux.img

As you can see this is quite the nightmare to script if you wanted your new machine to be automatically configured with your config from git. So I am making a note of this, so I have a reference when I spend the customary day setting up my Archlinux box once purchasing a new machine.

If you run runlevel, you can confirm which runlevel you're in. You can run init 6 to reboot and init 0 to halt. init 1 is to boot into an odd mode without networking IIRC, still don't actually know what it's all about.