Although being much more conservative (and sound) than M$ Windows, also linux systems have several programs and services run at startup. Here is how you can manage, add and remove them.

Since Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 more and more services are switched from Init to Upstart. This means the above mentioned procedures are not valid any more for the transitioned services. At the time of writing we can manage these startup services only by hand moving out their script.

Basically those services we do not want to load automatically at boot time should have their config script moved to another directory, let’s say init-disabled

mv /etc/init/apport.conf /etc/init-disabled/apport.conf

——

Init services scripts are located in

(on Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE)

/etc/init.d/ 

(on RedHat, Fedora)

/etc/rc.d/init.d

you can manually act with those scripts:
sudo /etc/init.d/[script] start/stop/restart/force-reload

scripts managers:

on Ubuntu
System -> Administration -> Services

on Ubuntu,Debian

update-rc.d [daemon] defaults/remove

note: in order for the script to be added (defaults) it must be present in /etc/init.d, on the other hand for the script to be removed it must be either delated/renamed from the same folder or must be used the force -f option. The latter is more convenient since enables you and other programs to start the daemon when needed.

update-rc.d -f [daemon] remove

on RedHat

redhat-config-services

on Fedora

system-config-services

other useful utilities to accomplish these tasks (installable via apt-get install are:

sysv-rc-conf
chkconfig
sysvconfig [deprecated]
bum