[SLUG] If its not broken, dont (attempt to) fix it?

[Adams, Jamie]

Everything was going swimmingly last night. I got my sound card working, got
my swirly debian logo at logon, and my loverly coloured file names (cheers
gavin). It was all running perfectly.

Then everything went horribly wrong. Really horribly wrong.

Debian had a lot of services running at bootup that I didn't think I needed,
such as leafnode and wwwoffle and other such things that I have never heard
of. So I thought I would have a crack at getting rid of some of them.

It used to be a fairly painless process in Mandrake, you could do it through
the control center. In Redhat I used to use the ksysv utility, which worked
fine. I plumped for ksysv, told it that I was using Debian and started to
remove the ones I didn't want. It all looked okay, so I saved my changes and
skipped past the warning that doing it all wrong could bugger up my system.

On bootup I noticed that there was a lot (loads) more information than usual
scrolling past, most of it said something about forcing loads and tainting
the kernel. It looked like this was something to do with the USB modules so
I used the modconf utility and removed them from the kernel. I dont use any
USB stuff anyway.

Now all the other modules are complaining about forced loads and kernel
tainting (whatever that is) and I have no mouse or keyboard in X....
arrrrrgggggggggggg!!!!! If I did not have such a pretty case I would have
kicked the bloody thing through the window!!

Anyway, it looks like it will be quicker to reinstall the whole thing than
fixing it. I should be able to install it pretty quickly now that I know
roughly what im doing, but its frustrating that I dont know what I did to
create all these problems in the first place.

Can anyone suggest a foolproof was or removing the extra redundant services
at startup? ksysv might not have been the problem, but I have vowed never to
use it again!
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