[clug] Runlevel 5 vs 3 and startx

Arafangion thestar at fussycoder.id.au
Thu Nov 24 00:33:12 GMT 2005


On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 12:16 pm, Michael James wrote:
> Dear Cluggers,
<snip>
> Am I just being old-fashioned keeping my servers at runlevel 3?
> Is there no real resource penalty to having them at 5 all the time?
> (If it's just a bit of inactive RAM, it'll soon be swapped out.)

I always considered runlevels 3 and 5 to be a case of sensible defaults, 
tailed for the situation.

To change from runlevel 3 to 5, and vice versa, is much more trivial than to 
change scores of configuration files.

Another way to think about it is perhaps having runlevel 3 to suit a desktop, 
but having runlevel 5 made to suit a laptop with all it's power settings and 
the like. Likewise, runlevel 3 is classically set to be a 'console' session, 
while runlevel 5 is classically set to also run X.

In any case, startx is not obsolete, though I suspect that Suze users are much 
more biased towards a graphical desktop than, for instance, Debian users are.
Suze should allow a method for you to override a security setting.

Personally, I'd leave it as it is, a server does not need a monitor or even a 
keyboard - just log into it remotedly and forward X11 to your client 
computer, and you do not need to be in runlevel 5 to do that, or even to run 
startx, though X11 libraries will need to be installed.


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