SysVinit versus Systemd

[mark9117]

Okay, I realize that things need to move forward. I am well aware that there are things in Linux systems that could use a fair bit of improvement (let's try not to hash out Wayland vs. Mir in this one). My issue is things have a tendency to get, well, complicated.

Take systemd for example. It's much more efficient and contributes a lot toward the efficiency of service startup, etc. in the Linux system. I get that and I appreciate it, but I was a guy who used sysVinit to manage running services a lot. I was pretty fair at using chkconfig to set things up the way I wanted them. Now, I have to start making the transition to a new system.

Bother.

My issue is illustrated by this example: to check what systems were being managed before, all I had to do was:

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ls /etc/rc.d/init.d/

or even better

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chkconfig --list

Now I have to either remember all this, or dump it into a bash script:

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systemctl list-unit-files --type=service

or

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ls /lib/systemd/system/*.service /etc/systemd/system/*.service

Seems like a small thing, but the last option is miserable. I can not seem to remember it. And intuitive? Not on any day of the week.

I mean, "list-unit-files" - that's three effing hyphens in there. Not at all elegant.

And the rest of it "--type=service" - how does that make any sense?

I obviously don't know this system for beans, and it' annoying to try and figure it out.

I mean used to, if I wanted to restart my network, it was just "service network restart" - simple, intuitive, elegant. And it still works. There's a tweak of some kind in sysVinit that allows it to hand off the process to systemd. But I know deep down that such a thing won't last forever. I'm eventually going to have to get used to new syntax, new commands and tagging ".service" onto the end of everything.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

It's almost enough to make me want to use a GUI.

Okay, ventilated.

Mark

[sander85]

There are few things to make your life easier. One such thing is bash-completion package. After installing it and reloading your bash you can complete commands with tab.

The .service suffix isn't needed AFAIK. At least not in the latest version of systemd if I'm correct. But when using tab it shouldn't make life much harder anyway.

The command service won't go anywhere any time soon. And with the combination of bash-comletion package you can just type service <tab> and it will offer to show you all possible services.

It also makes easier using systemctl.

Hope this helps!

[mark9117]

Thanks Sander85, I didn't really need help. Just blowing off steam. I had to work on a system and upgraded it to Mageia 3. That meant dealing with this and having the nagging sense that I'm behind the curve and need to catch up without any real desire to change.

At any rate all is well and I'll move on to complain about something else for a while. But I have to say that installing Mageia 3 from the live CD actually went very smoothly. The RAlink wifi actually fired right up and I had no display issues at all!

Now, whose idea was it to make LXFCE the default window manager?


Mark

[doktor5000]

You could use systemadm or something like serman: http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/serman/

[mark9117]

Wasn't aware of those dok, thanks for the tipski!

Mark