We have a box running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 in office. The box began acting weird with random reboots and display problems but that’s another story.
While moving around logged in from the virtual console, I could see a lot of un-necessary services were started in runlevel 2 ( default runlevel in Ubuntu which boots to X Window System ).
Now, Redhat/CentOS has chkconfig –list and chkconfig servicename off to check and disable services.
Ubuntu has a package sysv-rc-conf which can be installed via APT,
sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
sysv-rc-conf is a ncurses based program which allows to enable/disable services in all runlevels.
Enabling and disabling services becomes a walk in the park which would otherwise involve removing symbolic links from the respective /etc/rc.d/ runlevel directory.
Update: Alternative way to disable services is to use the default update-rc.d script.
update-rc.d cups remove
This will remove the symbolic links corresponding to the service name from /etc/rc.d/ directories from all run levels.