runlevels

[Bob Nielsen]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 05:12:02PM +1300, Jim Cheetham wrote:
> What you describe is pretty much the original unix usage of run-levels 
> ... single-user at 1, multi-user at 2 (i.e. the login service starts), 
> networking at level 3 (well, network servers like NFS, not client stuff 
> and basic IP functionality) ... and GUI at level 5. 4 didn't seem to be 
> used for much, as far as I can remember ;-)
> 
> These days, many distributions have chosen to do everything at runlevel 
> 2. I'm not quite sure I fully appreciate the reasoning behind this.
> 
> Certainly GRUB can be asked to have different choices, reflecting 
> different runlevels. Just a matter of tagging the runlevel number at 
> the end of the boot specifier. However, unpicking the init script 
> dependancies is much more difficult.
> 
> I'd like to see an explanation for picking runlevel 2 as the 
> "everything" level ...
> 

I recall seeing somewhere that Debian chose to do this for simplicity
and allow the user to customize runlevels 3-5 (which are the same as
runlevel 2 by default) as they saw fit.  Debian offspring such as Ubuntu
carry it over.