This tarball contains a stripped down system which does not have /sbin/init. Put it on whatever partition, and boot from it, specifying "init=/init" kernel parameter. It will provide you with seven gettys on vt2..vt8, nmeter on vt9, top on vt10, klog on vt11, and syslog on vt12. There are two user accounts: "root" and "user". This tarball is mostly a quick and dirty example taken from my desktop system. It is intended to demonstrate that /sbin/init is overdesigned. There is no real reasons why stuff like getty is run by init. There is also no real reasons why reboot/poweroff is done by init. And if you remove those two tasks, init does almost nothing. If you will examine the tarball, you will see that gettys and nmeter/top/klog/syslog is controlled by runsvdir, and can be selectively stopped/started by sv. On real system, I just add more /var/service/something directories with stuff I would like to run (apache, sshd, samba, nfs.....). You will also find that reboot/poweroff are shell scripts, which work without any interaction with init. And finally, you will see that init is a trivial shell script, which does nothing. I am sure that there are some rough edges, please report those.