[ -- this is ment for the 2.60 release -- Mike ]


	Propaganda for version 2.60 of sysvinit & utilities
	==================================================

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.

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
because I spent almost halt a year in Australia. Therefore the
description below is a comparison of 2.4 and 2.60 (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). In the package
the new-style scripts are included as an example. These scripts
ran without modification on all systems I tried it on, but probably
not on your system, according to Murphy. So some tweaking is probably
required.

Because of these changes, it is now possible for the brave SystemV
fans under you to write a complete sysv style boot up environment -
a sample directory with scripts for that case is also included. I
wanted to make that the default, but it seems unnessecary complex
for a simple Linux box. I did test the scripts, but a long time ago.
I have updated them regulary to keep in sync with the rest of the
code, but haven't tested it anymore after that.

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.

One interesting new feature in this init package is that it
actually supports a serial line as the "console" - if you enter
single user mode from a serial terminal (by "init S" or
"shutdown now") that terminal will become the logical system console
if it's listed in /etc/securetty. This means that /dev/console
gets linked to the tty line of the terminal. A new device gets
created, /dev/systty that is the physical console - aka /dev/tty0.
Note that this ofcourse does not happen on an "ordinary" reboot.

The problem with this is that most programs that use special
virtual console system calls (like dosemu, and XFree) try to
access /dev/console instead of tty0 and they don't like to find
a serial device there. The only solution is to create a /dev/tty0
(or in my case, a /dev/vc00) and patch the source (or binary)
of the offending program to use that device instead of /dev/console.

Some other general changes:
- utility "runlevel" to read the current and previous runlevel from
  /etc/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).
- 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
* powerd, a higly configurable UPS watchdog.
* manpages for everything
* sample scripts to set up an /etc/rc.d directory with scripts per runlevel.

The new sysv init can be found on:

tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/sources/sbin as sysvinit-2.60.tgz
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Daemons as sysvinit-2.60.tgz

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

Mike. (10-Jul-1995)


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