ronny.haryan.to

Runlevels in Gentoo are meaningful names instead of numbers. However, underneath they are still numbers, and the mapping is done in /etc/inittab. The symlinks are in /etc/runlevels.

    l0:0:wait:/sbin/rc shutdown
    l1:S1:wait:/sbin/rc single
    l2:2:wait:/sbin/rc nonetwork
    l3:3:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l4:4:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l5:5:wait:/sbin/rc default
    l6:6:wait:/sbin/rc reboot

This is different than what I was used to (Red Hat and Fedora). In RH or Fedora, runlevel 3 is the default runlevel with no X, and runlevel 5 will start X and a graphical login manager like gdm. In Gentoo by default the graphical login manager is started at boot when the xdm service is added to the default runlevel with rc-update add xdm default.

As you see from the snippet of my /etc/inittab above, runlevels 3, 4 and 5 all map to the default runlevel. So if I wanted to make runlevel 3 and 5 behave like RH or Fedora, I could change the map for runlevel 3 to, say, console and then create the console directory in /etc/runlevels then start adding the services I want to start in the console runlevel with rc-update add ... console, minus xdm of course.