Here are runit RPM and SRPM for Cen­tOS 4.2 (prob­a­bly works on some oth­er dis­tros as well).

You install it, then clone your GRUB (or LILO) entry so you boot passing init=/s­bin/runit-init to the kernel and when you boot it, it should start on a rather normal-looking runlevel 3.

To re­boot or halt, use re­boot-runit and halt-runit, please!

Keep in mind that this is just a be­gin­ning, since all your ser­vices (ex­cept your ttys :-) are still run­ning with­out su­per­vi­sion!

Should not de­stroy any­thing, but use at your own risk.

You will have to work fur­ther if you want to do more.

Included is /etc/runit/services/test a trivial template service.

Sor­ry about the spam­my host­ing, but I will get a de­cent serv­er space for these files some­where even­tu­al­ly. These rpms are just a teaser, any­way :-)