Hi there,

I am fairly new to Linux, but so far I have been relatively successful in getting stuff to work thanks entirely to the help on the Internet and on LQ in particular.

I read in Linux Format this month that it could quicken my boot time by turning off unnecessary services (I suppose services are really daemons, are they?).

In the magazine it mentions MySQL, Apache, Samba and NFS. I don't host a web server on my computer, so I don't need Apache, MySQL - I dont' think I will need. NFS - I'm not sure what it is.

Anyway, my question: how does one turn off these service/daemons? Is it in the kernel configuration?

thanks
Hamish

Each S symlink in an /etc/rc.d subdirectory is used to start a service at a particular run-level on boot up - ( these S symlinks point to the actual services in /etc/rc.d/init.d ) - if you dont want a service to start on boot up then remove the S symlink from the relevant run level directory you use - the relevant directory for run level 5 ie graphical mode is /etc/rc.d/rc5.d - so just create a directory to hold the removed services (just in case you want to put them back at a later date) then use the mv command to move your chosen symlinks into this newly created directory - then on next boot up the relevant services wont start as desired - if you ever want to restart those services on boot up then simply move the relevant symlinks back to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d or whatever run-level directory you want.

An example - stopping the Random number generator on boot up

create a new directory as root user in a shell.

mkdir /etc/removed_services

then

mv /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S20random /etc/removed_services

this symlink is now not in the run-level 5 directory hence the service wont start on boot up.