On Saturday 11 September 2004 09:03 am, Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
Usually, you can add 'single' or 'emergency' to boot into single-user recovery mode, or enter a number (ie: 3) to boot to a specific runlevel.
"Single" or "Emergency" are usually Runlevel 1, single-user repair mode. Level 3 is usually full-network services, everything except GUI; GUI mode is usually 5. Level 6 is reboot.
Runlevel 2 is less commonly standardized, it's usually multi-user without networking, but is often undefined, and sometimes the equivalent of level 3 (on some systems it's equivalent to 3 and is the default).
You should be able to tell your loader something like "linux 3" to specify a runlevel, where "linux" is one of the labels in the boot menu, not a specific command. Most loaders also respond to "<label> single", some recognize "s" and/or "S".
Runlevels are part of the SysV init standard, and these days the distributions that don't actually use them emulate them (like gentoo).