F11pre: Strange setting in inittab

[Will Woods]

On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 16:55 -0400, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I just installed F11pre as an update from F10 and while going through
> all the *.rpmnew files came across this line from /etc/inittab:
> 
>         id:3:initdefault
> 
> rather than the more conventional:
> 
>         id:5:initdefault
> 
> Is this a bug or a feature (he said, expecting the answer "yes")?

It's a "feature". 3 is still the default setting, for historical
reasons. The installer flips that to 5 for these (very common) install
cases:

- Interactive installs[1],
- LiveCD installs, 
- kickstart installs with 'xconfig --startxonboot'

You could argue that 5 should be the default, and the installer should
flip it to 3 for those cases that require it, but... easiest to just
leave it all as-is until we get around to replacing the entire thing
with Upstart[2].

Anyway, feel free to delete inittab.rpmnew - you probably want to keep
your system as-is.

-w

[1] Unless you disable all the packages that provide
"service(graphical-login)", or use text mode or VNC

[2] Or something else even newer and more confusing, just to further
irritate the old-school types.