What do INITs mean?
 

Hello,
I am new to this forum which I found of great help for a newbie like me! Thanks to you all for your cooperation.

The distro I am trying is Mandrake 10 and I am writing from Argentina.

One of my doubts (I have many but will try to ask them one at the time) is:

What are INITs (init 2; init 3; etc) and what are they used for?

As far as I understood, they are accessing levels. For instance, to install the nvidia driver I followed instructions telling me to type init 2 in order to install it. After that I went back to init 5.

Well, any easy explanation for a newbie will be very welcome.

Thanks.

init 0-6 correspond to the different runlevels.

init 1 is single user mode(root)
init 3 is maintenance mode.
and 5 is the graphical+networking+whatever else,

these can be veiwed by looking through init.d files, depending on your distros directory format.

The init is a program that init-ializes the operating system. It runs during the boot-up. I'm not sure what init 1, 2, 3 or 5 is. I know what runlevels 1,2,3 and 5 are, though. Runlevel 1 is single-user mode [only the most basic system services initialized and a root shell opened], runlevels 2 and 3 are multi-user modes (with or without NFS) [everything initialized, but only the text prompt is opened], runlevel 5 is graphical mode [all servers and services started, goes into graphical login screen]. You can configure /etc/inittab to boot into either one of these runlevels. Maybe this is what it means, though I'm not sure.

<edit> Didn't see the previous post when I wrote this. </edit>

Here is an article that explains run levels and other information about the Linux boot process. I had bookmarked it and had found it to be helpful.

http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/23.html

Thanks for the help
 

Thank you for the help. It was very useful.