On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 10:46 +0100, Neil Winchurst wrote:
One thing I have never worked out in Linux. When I log in there are
various programs that start automatically. If I do ps -e I can see a
list of what is running.
Programs related to your desktop environment are tracked via the various
Preferences settings of that environment, System->Preferences->Sessions
in GNOME. These include applets and other GUI stuff.
Is there some way of removing a program from this list so that it
does not start at log in? I am thinking of something like mysql which
I use sometimes but not every time I log in.
MySQL is actually running all the time - it isn't started at login, it
is started at boot, it is just that you can't see it without logging in
(either directly or via SSH etc.)
I do not necessarily
want such programs to be running all the time in the background in
case I want to use them.
If you are running a website on that box, you will need it all the time
in the background if the website needs SQL data. MySQL exists as a
server to support server-type operations - running websites and other
applications that can be queried remotely. i.e. LAMP - Linux, Apache and
MySQL need to always be running (PHP/Perl are special cases that are
called on-demand).
Starting mysql each time is quite a bit of overhead - mysql is designed
to run in the background and does various clean-up tasks in idle time.
Server processes are dictated by the /etc/init.d files and relevant
runlevel symlinks in /etc/rc*.d/ - configured by root and controllable
using 'sudo invoke-rc.d prog start|stop|restart' etc.
You probably don't actually want to stop mysql from behaving as a server
- if you don't want a database acting as a server, uninstall mysql and
use SQLite instead. The amount of overhead of a background mysql process
is tiny - until you start running queries.
If you need to temporarily stop mysql, use invoke-rc.d
As root you can run a gui
