[ILUG] Init vs telinit

[John P. Looney]

On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 05:31:08PM +0100, Nick Hilliard mentioned:
> >  Well, perhaps recently they've aquired it. But runlevels was one of the
> > things that made RedHat a BSD/SysV hybrid 
> 
> Errrr, what?  RedHat is as much BSD as Solaris is, except that it uses
> bsd-style "ps" and a few other utilities by default.  Neither RedHat nor any
> other form of Linux are even remotely a BSD hybrid.

 There are loads of bsd-isms; from simple stuff like usage of /var/log
instead of /var/adm, to shipping "cu" instead of "tip" - I admit it's not
much, but they didn't try keep to SVr4 standards. Linux was always meant
to make both camps at home (but it probably didn't work out that way - GNU
stuff isn't BSD or SVr4.

 Slackware didn't have init scripts when I used it first - just SunOS like
/etc/rc.start /etc/rc.boot and /etc/rc.inet etc. Most likely for
simplicity - RedHat's init scripts are a nightmare these days.

> > - 4.4 didn't have it, I'm about
> > 95% sure.
> BSD doesn't have runlevels - never did.  It has two run modes: multiuser and
> single user.  Single-user just means that init spawns /bin/sh instead of
> /etc/rc at bootup, and to the best of my knowledge, booting up in single
> user mode has been possible for ever.  This is not the same as runlevels.

 Whoohoo. My brain wasn't that faulty then.

> > Yes, SCO actually have a nice Unix!
> Read: "I have lost my mind and am a raving lunatic.  Please ignore me".

 Meep. When I used it, back in the SCO 3.x days, it was atrocious. It was
so bad, that I wiped Isocor's QA server (running SCO) and stuck freeBSD on
it (Linux wasn't quite upto the stress testing we put the FreeBSD box to,
back in the 1.2.8 days...or maybe I just needed a change ;). It suffered
from small things like "Shut it down three times, and it'll have refused
to come down at least once, requiring a power-off. Do that three times,
and you'll have to reinstall". Also, it's NFS server used to run 8
processes, all using 100% CPU time - when idle.

> Just kidding, but SCO _is_ inelegant.

 And if you put on "C2 security option", it's unusable. You can't edit
text files in /etc without going through a curses interface to them, that
sanity checked everything. Good idea, bad implementation.

> > The worst Unix IMO is Solaris. It's supposed to be a SySV, but it's the
> > most 'unique' unix i've come across. It has loads of solaris'isms that
> > just make it a pain to work on if you don't know it.[1]
> A good operating system is an operating system which (among other things)
> does well what it claims to do well.  Solaris does many things well, even if
> the layout is sometimes a little impenetrable.

 Though, I think for big systems, Solaris kicks ass. It's not as
user-friendly as linux, but I've never had severe problems with it (though
I did come across a large number of car-accident level problems while
doing support for it, with Horizon).

Kate 

-- 
"The fool must be beaten with a stick, for an intelligent person 
the merest hint is sufficient"                -- Zen Master Greg