On Friday Scott James announced that Upstart is now ready to replace sysvinit. Recently when I gave my first impressions of Upstart, I was a little worried that this system could not be ready for Edgy next month. After reading this update though I feel more confident that the Ubuntu team can pull it together and get it working for the 6.10 release.

It now seems that they have all the basic functionality in place to make a full replacement of sysvinit. With my initial review I was a little concerned when I realized you could not easily shut down or restart your system using Upstart. Now that have that functionality the system really does look like it will be ready for the release of 6.10.

Personally I can not wait, I like change it gives you something to look forward too. Far too many Linux distros are stagnating recently, just release updates to programs that have been around for many years. That stability is great for servers, but for desktop systems they thrive on change. Sometimes it is good to shake things up a little.

*Update 9/12/2006: Fixed a silly typo where I said upstart “is not ready” when I meant to say upstart “is now ready.” Big difference.

*UPDATE: 9/3/2006 It seems that Upstart will be ready for Edgy.

Upstart is a new boot loader that is in development that could be a potential replacement for sysvinit. The program is basically in charge of starting up all the programs you need when you start your machine to make it do anything useful. This program is quite important because it is a major factor in determining how long your computer takes to boot.

I first heard about Upstart a few days ago. It is being developed by some of the developers at Canonical Limited, the company behind Ubuntu, and is looking like a good system. You can read in more detail about how Upstart works when compared to other systems, but basically it differs from the others in that it uses an Event Driven model to boot the system rather than a liner system.