Running Services at Boot

Although most people consider a computer to be either on or off, in Ubuntu and Linux in general, there are a number of states in between. Known as runlevels, they define what system services are started upon boot. These services are simply applications running in the background that provide some needed function to your system, such as getting information from your mouse and sending it to the display; or a service could monitor the partitions to see whether they have enough free space left on them. Services are typically loaded and run (also referred to as being started) during the boot process, in the same way as Microsoft Windows services are. Internally, Ubuntu uses a system known as Upstart instead of the classic ...

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