Ask most unix admins and they’ll tell you that the way Mac OS X now handles launching services is really odd. True enough when compared to Linux or Solaris, but if Apple is the highest volume UNIX vendor in the world can it truly be called odd? Well, no, not odd…just different. It seems odd if you learned some other flavor of unix before coming to the Mac but this isn’t an area that only Apple’s trying to sort out…Solaris 10 sysadmins are now grappling with a new services startup system as well. For Apple, starting with release 10.4 (Tiger) all services get started by launchd.
deskbox: ps -ax | grep launchd
1 ?? S<s 0:00.54 /sbin/launchd
Notice that launchd, not init is now process #1
If you click the link behind launchd in the earlier paragraph, you’ll get a really nice explanation of how it works (and what it replaces) from the folks over at AFP548 (a must-visit site for Mac OS X system administrators). Today’s entry covers the next iteration, a GUI front-end for the whole thing…Lingon
This is a really nice product and the Cocoa sourcecode is available. I grabbed a copy of the source and used it to try out the new XCode 2.2 compiler and all went well. I created a G5 version and a universal binary version just for practice. No errors in either. Here’s a brief description of Lingon from the project’s homepage:
Lingon is a graphical interface for creating launchd configuration files and controlling them through launchctl for Mac OS X Tiger. (launchd is a system daemon that is used to run scripts/programs automatically, repeatedly or at certain times.) You get all your launchd configuration files listed in a table so you easily can see which are loaded and what they do, and you can also load and unload any easily. If you want to create or edit a launchd configuration file you can do that in Lingon through an assistant or in an easy graphical way (or through an built-in text editor, should you want to).
I think the software is named after the Whortleberry but I can’t really be sure (I think I am sure the program’s icon looks like a berry). If so, it’s a good name since one property of the whortleberry is the ability “to increase night vision.” Anyone who delves into this area of system administration will sometimes feel they’re working in the dark.
http://lingon.sourceforge.net