services

sulekha

i recently downloaded a command line utility named sysv-rc-conf for enabling/disabling services in different runlevels.This utility is showing far more services than shown by system -> administration -> services GUI tool. now i am able to see many services such as brltty, loopback, rmnologin,dbus festival .....

now my question is as follows

what are the following services and what do they signify??

1)loopback
2)rmnologin
3)mtab
4)hotkey-se
5)module-in
6)mountvirt
7) urandom
8)brltty
9)festival

vor

I would imagine all these things have brief comments at the top of their respective init files. Look in /etc/init.d/name_of_thing and check the top of the file.


tinivole

* loopback is to do with associating filesystems on your computer as files (ie: /dev/sda1), at least I think.

* rmnologin = Remote No Login (or remote login is disabled... I think).
* mtab is the daemon that holds the complete list of mounted filesystems on your PC (including virtual filesystems such as tmpfs and gvfs filesystems).

* not sure about hotkey-se... Although the word "HOTKEY" itself says alot about it.
* module-in I think is self explanitory (Hint: /etc/modules)
* mountvirt handles your virtual filesystems (such as tmpfs and gvfs)
* urandom is the greatest tool in existance! (type in "echo $RANDOM" and you'll find out why)
* brltty is a display driver.

* festival is the Linux version of "Microsoft Sam", is it not? (Probably the only one in the list that is worth turning off without thinking about the consequences).

p_quarles

Festival is a speech synthesizer. I've never seen it enabled by default, but if you have fiddled with the accessibility features it all, that could explain why it is there on startup.

It is not essential for system operation unless, I suppose, for a user with vision difficulties.


anonymous

hotkey-se(tup) is for your hotkeys, such as Function+FX for suspend. If you're not on a laptop or don't use them you probably don't care.

urandom is a source of randomness that many programs use. don't stop it.

rmnologin allows you to log in once the system has booted far enough.