I’m sure many of you might stumbled upon this problem when you discovered first hand that there is no /etc/inittab file on Ubuntu Edgy Eft or Feisty Fawn.

This is deliberate because Ubuntu do not use init anymore to manage its services during startup or shutdown of the system. Instead it uses ‘upstart‘ as replacement for the traditional sysvinit utility that is common to Linux-based operating system.

All the things that you used to have in the /etc/inittab is ported to upstart’s /etc/event.d/.

It might take some of time to get used to the way upstart manage things in your computer, For example, the settings for ‘tty3′ is located in ‘/etc/event.d/tty3′ if you need to change it’s parameter, and rc scripts on rc*.

Additionally You can use ‘runlevel’ command to determine which runlevel your computer is in.

Please refer to Upstart Project page if you’re interested to know more about the project