Manually Starting and Stopping 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. 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 reenable the display manager. This way, if you make a mistake, you can fix it and get it right without having to reboot every time.

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 

As noted in the previous section, you can also use the YaST Runlevel Editor in Expert Mode to start, stop, or restart any service.