Ubuntu – cannot change runlevel from 5 to 3

initrunlevel

i'm trying to change from runlevel 5 to runlevel 3 by running sudo init 3 command.
for some reason it doesn't do anything anymore.
the weird thing is that if i run the command runlevel it shows me that i'm at level 3.
tried to run init 5 and then init 3 and still nothing.

does anybody knows how to fix it?

Best Answer

From the manpages:

   Runlevels are a concept from UNIX(R)  System  V  used  by  the  init(8)
   daemon  or other system initialisation system to define modes of system
   operation.
   The Upstart init(8) daemon has no  native  concepts  of  runlevel,  and
   unlike  the  System  V  daemon,  makes  no attempt to keep track of the
   current runlevel.

Ubuntu and other modern Linux distributions have replaced System V init with Upstart:

Upstart is an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running.

If you must switch to what is now closest to runlevel 3 do it by stopping your gdm or lightdm service.

Related Solutions

Reboot – Is Reboot the Same as Init 6?

There is really never any compelling reason to use init 6 instead of reboot, unless:

For some reason you are missing the reboot executable, or
You are deliberately trying to avoid notifying users that the system is going down.

reboot (so long as you don't run reboot --force) is actually the "softer" way to shut down.

Consider:

init 6 will run all of the shutdown scripts in /etc/init/rc.* as it reduces system's runlevel

But the reboot command, called without the --force flag, only directly reboots the system (via the reboot system call) when one of these two situations applies:

The system is in runlevel 0 (single user mode), so there is no reduction of runlevel that can occur, so no shutdown scripts are automatically run.
The system is in runlevel 6. What init 6 does it to put the system in runlevel 6. Again, there's nothing running init 6 will do that running the reboot command won't do.

Otherwise, sudo reboot is equivalent to sudo shutdown -r now. This does all the nice things sudo init 6 does, but also:

notifies users that the system is going down.
prevents new logins (though they probably wouldn't succeed anyway).
is more intuitive and self-documenting than sudo init 6.

If you're on a system with only you logged in, and only local logins, there is nothing wrong with using init 6 to reboot. If that's how you prefer to reboot, then by all means, go ahead--you're not harming anything by doing so. But there's also nothing objectively preferable about doing it this way.

init's own documentation says it's not the normal way to shut down or reboot the system. Consider that when init is run by the user (like when you run sudo init 6), it actually runs telinit (see man init). telinit is what actually changes runlevels. And man telinit tells us:

Normally you would use the shutdown(8) tool to halt or reboot the system, or to bring it down to single-user mode.

Upstart – Command Runs in Bash but Not from /etc/init: Troubleshooting

The deluge docs have something similar to yours but I think this is a hangover from very old versions of Upstart. I'd try simplifying it down to something like this first:

description "Deluge daemon"
author "Deluge Team"

start on filesystem and static-network-up
stop on runlevel [016]

respawn
respawn limit 5 30

setuid debian-deluged
setgid debian-deluged
umask 007

exec /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/deluged -L info -l /var/log/deluged/server.log -c /var/opt/deluged/config -p 8112 -- -d

And then if that still doesn't work, check the permissions on /var/log/deluged/ and /var/log/deluged/server.log (that the debian-deluged user can write there). If it's still not working then, the upstart log files might help you out. Yours will be /var/log/upstart/deluged.log. If that shows nothing, we could just try launching the command as the right user:

sudo -u debian-deluged -g debian-deluged /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/deluged -L info -l /var/log/deluged/server.log -c /var/opt/deluged/config -p 8112 -- -d

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Reboot – Is Reboot the Same as Init 6?

Upstart – Command Runs in Bash but Not from /etc/init: Troubleshooting

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