7.2.7 Services

An important part of preparing an operating-system declaration is listing system services and their configuration (see Using the Configuration System). System services are typically daemons launched when the system boots, or other actions needed at that time—e.g., configuring network access.

Services are managed by GNU dmd (see Introduction in GNU dmd Manual). On a running system, the deco command allows you to list the available services, show their status, start and stop them, or do other specific operations (see Jump Start in GNU dmd Manual). For example:

# deco status dmd

The above command, run as root, lists the currently defined services. The deco doc command shows a synopsis of the given service:

# deco doc nscd
Run libc's name service cache daemon (nscd).

The start, stop, and restart sub-commands have the effect you would expect. For instance, the commands below stop the nscd service and restart the Xorg display server:

# deco stop nscd
Service nscd has been stopped.
# deco restart xorg-server
Service xorg-server has been stopped.
Service xorg-server has been started.

The following sections document the available services, starting with the core services, that may be used in an operating-system declaration.