

	Propaganda for version 2.58 of sysvinit & utilities
	==================================================

NOTE: If you use a standard distribution like Slackware, Debian
or Redhat there probably is no need to upgrade. Installing sysvinit
is only for those that upgrade their system by hand or for people
that create Linux distributions.

Sysvinit is probably the most widely used init package for Linux.
Most distributions use it. sysvinit 2.4 is really a good package,
and it was not the need for bugfixes but the need for more features
that made me work on sysvinit again.

Sysvinit is now a debian package. Debian source packages are not
special in any way -- in fact you can just unpack and compile
it on any other Linux distribution.

There was a 2.50 release of sysvinit but that was not very popular-
some of the included scripts broke with certain shells and other
minor things like that. Unfortunately I was not able to fix this
at the time because I was abroad for some time. Therefore the
description below is a comparison of 2.4 and 2.58 (actually the
same blurb as from the 2.50 announce but updated).

Wrt 2.4, some of the code has been made simpler. Everything, from
halt to reboot to single user mode is now done by shell scripts
that are executed directly by init (from /etc/inittab), so shutdown
does not kill processes anymore and then calls reboot - it merely
does some wall's to the logged in users and then switches to
runlevel 0 (halt), 1 (single user) or 6 (reboot).

I have removed support for the old style scripts; the included
example scripts are the Debian GNU/Linux distribution scripts.
This does not mean that eg the Slackware scripts stop to work;
you can probably drop this init into Slackware 3.0 without problems.

Most people have an entry in inittab to run shutdown when CTRL-ALT-DEL
is pressed; a feature has been added to shutdown to check if a
authorized user is logged in on one of the consoles to see if a
shutdown is allowed. This can be configured with an access file.

Some other general changes:
- utility "runlevel" to read the current and previous runlevel from
  /var/run/utmp (it's also shown on the command line if you do a "ps").
- unreckognized options are silently ignored (such as the infamous
  "ro" - mount root file system read only).
- if the file /etc/initscript is present it will be used to launch
  all programs that init starts (so that you can set a generic
  umask, ulimit eg for ALL processes - see initscript.sample).
- A "sulogin" program added that always asks for the root
  passsword before entering single user mode.
- A "-b" flag to init that starts a shell at boot time before
  _any_ other processing.
- I moved /etc/fastboot to /fastboot - wonder what that's gonna break :)
- I even updated the manpages!

Right, now some boring stuff you already know since it's the same
as in the 2.4 release:

The sysvinit package includes

* a sysv compatible /sbin/init program
* a telinit program (er, just a link to /sbin/init) to change runlevels
* a featureful shutdown
* halt and reboot to assist shutdown
* a very forgiving last utility
* the wall & mesg programs (not installed by default)
* manpages for everything

The new sysv init can be found on:

tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/sources/sbin as sysvinit-2.58-1.tar.gz
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Daemons as sysvinit-2.58-1.tar.gz

It will be moved there in a few days, in the mean time it is
probably in the Incoming directory.

Mike. (02-Jan-1996)

