Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has adopted
systemd as its
default system and service manager, i.e., the
init manager. Although systemd offers many benefits, such as, aggressively starting services concurrently, you may sometimes want to switch back to
upstart,
the older system and service manager for Ubuntu because some services that you still have to run depend on it. Below are the steps that you can play with to switch to back
upstart. However, since Ubuntu 16.04 is now designed with
systemd as default system and service manager, many other services and applications are not designed to work without
systemd.
As a result, the following steps, as a few readers have noticed, may render your Ubuntu installation unusable. To run a Linux system without using
systemd, the best approach is, to select and set up a Linux distribution that does not rely on
systemd. See the
Without-Systemd Wiki for more information and a list of Linux distributions.
- Install
upstart-sysv and remove systemd-sysv.
sudo apt-get install upstart-sysv
-
Update
Ubuntu to reflect the change that you just made.
sudo update-initramfs -u
-
Now you need to remove a few remaining
systemd package in the system. This step removes package including libpam-systemd.
sudo apt-get purge systemd
If you do not perform this step, you will see an error message as follows after you reboot the system and log back in.
[ 26.664057] systemd-logind[4445]: Failed to start user service, ignoring: Unknown unit: user@1000.service
-
Now reboot and log back in. You should see your system with a clean bill of health with
upstartd back at the helm.
