Vincent Danen takes a look at Ubuntu’s Upstart system, which is an event-based replacement for SysV init that handles the starting of tasks and services during boot.

When I was working on the Annvix project, I was fascinated with how the system booted and services were started. This led to an eventual rewrite of initialization scripts and the use of runit instead of the traditional SysV init.

We took a look at upstart more than half a year ago, and at that point it was only beginning to emerge. In Ubuntu 7.10 and beyond, we are beginning to see the result of what eventually will be a complete replacement for System V. Since we’ll be seeing more of upstart in future Ubuntu versions, in Fedora 9, and other distributions, let’s take a look at how to make and manage Upstart jobs.

Look at methods for determining disk usage across multiple UNIX® systems and how to create a simple warning system to alert you of potential problems. Keeping an eye on your file systems and ensuring they don't fill up is a trivial, but ital process in the day-to-day management of your UNIX systems.

Because the traditional System V init daemon (SysVinit) does not deal well with modern hardware, including hotplug devices, USB hard and flash drives, and network-mounted filesystems, Ubuntu replaced it with the Upstart init daemon.

The VectorLinux Website is promising: “Speed, performance, stability -- these are attributes that set VectorLinux apart in the crowded field of Linux distributions. VectorLinux is a lighterweight, fast, Linux operating system for Intel-AMD x86 compatible systems and is based upon Slackware, one of the original Linux distributions…”

The TuxMobil project covers all aspects concerning Linux on laptops and notebooks. The number of free guides and how-to's has more than doubled in less than three years, and more than 7,000 links to Linux laptop and notebook installation and configuration guides are now listed at TuxMobil.

TuxMobil recently announced the publication of 7,000 Linux installation and configuration guides for laptops and notebooks on its Web site. The number of free guides and how-to's available through TuxMobil has more than doubled in less than three years.

Ubuntu developers invented Upstart as a replacement for the hoary old SysV init system, with the aim of meeting the complex demands of booting modern Linux systems. Upstart is being adopted by Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE. Akkana Peck introduces us to this Ubuntu success story.

If you log into the command line of both an Ubuntu system and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora system, very little will look different. There are common directories and utilities between the two, and functionality is fundamentally the same. So what makes Ubuntu different from other Linux distributions? One difference is the installer.