runlevels

[matthew.east at breathe.com]

I have a query regarding the current state of runlevels in ubuntu. Hope this 
is the right list. 

Since I am a laptop user I wondered about the possibility of choosing from 
grub to boot into two possible runlevels so that in one runlevel I would 
load my network services (network, ntpdate, smb, etc) and in the other 
runlevel I would not load network things, for when I am not using my laptop 
connected to a network. This is important because if I am not connected and 
I try my usual boot, it spends a fair while trying to get an ip via dhcp and 
so on. 

AFAICS the network starting services are in rcS, which as I understand it is 
started on every boot. So without a bit of working around, the result I 
describe in the previous paragraph is a bit difficult, especially with 
things like initscript dependencies. Of course, this is not helped by the 
fact that editing initscripts in ubuntu is pretty difficult, unless I have 
missed some tool. 

gentoo have lovely initscripts and it is easy as pie to get two runlevels 
such as those I have described into the grub menu. Can this be done with 
ubuntu? if not, will it ever be possible? 

thanks for your attention, Matt