Monday 21 March 2011

Graphical management of runlevel init scripts with Boot-Up Manager

I've been using boot-up manager to graphically configure and manage the init scripts run according to the run level. And its pretty useful. So I thought to share about this application in this post.



From http://www.marzocca.net/linux/bumdocs.html#introduction :

The scripts located in /etc/init.d are part of the bootup sequence of every Debian-like distro. Very often Ubuntu's documentation and guides have suggested - in order to deactivate init scripts - to change the permissions of the scripts in /etc/init.d, making them non-executable. This will have the following consequences:

* You'll get an error message at boot time (to avoid it you need to patch all the scripts);
* You are breaking the logical chain stated in debian-policy concerning runlevel configuration.

If the logic of a debian-like system boot up sequence is not very clear and familiar to you, you should not play with symlinks, permissions, etc. In order to avoid messing up your system, Boot-Up Manager will automate all of your configuration in a nice and clean graphical interface.

From http://www.marzocca.net/linux/bum.html :

Boot-Up Manager is a Perl-Gtk2 application to handle runlevels configuration of any debian derivative system. With this program the user will easily start and stop boot-up scripts, without the necessity to handle thru complex links and permissions.

Boot-Up Manager has been developed and tested on Ubuntu, but as it only relies on Perl-Gtk2 libraries, it can be run on any Debian-like system.

To install Boot-up manager under ubuntu, run the following terminal:

sudo apt-get install bum

Deb files are available for download for other debian based systems.

In order to run the application, go to System-> Administration -> Boot-up Manager or type the following in command menu:
su-to-root -X -c bum

You could refer to the above mentioned links for more technical details on bum.