YaST provides a extremely easy way for system administrators to manage which services run at boot. The YaST Runlevel Editor module is easy to understand and gives you important information about each service. You can choose to start or stop a process with nothing more than a mouse click.

To view what are the what services that are currently running, you can open the Runlevel Editor module from the YaST System page. It will display a list of all the available services. If you change the configuration file for a particular service, you usually have to stop and restart the service to use the new configuration. For example, when making changes to the X server, it is often worthwhile to change from Runlevel 5 to Runlevel 3 to test the changes, then switch back to re-enable the display manager. This way, if you make a mistake, you can fix it and get it right without having to reboot every time.

e.g. To stop, start, or restart any service, open a shell as the SuperUser. To see if your ALSA sound server is running, type the following:

/etc/init.d/alsasound status

The script will report its status. It should report

ALSA sound driver loaded.             running

To stop and restart the service, type

/etc/init.d/alsasound restart

and the following should appear:

Shutting down sound driver               done

Starting sound driver:  via82xx          done

Restoring the previous sound setting     done