Fixed: System has not been booted with systemd as init

If you are using Ubuntu inside Windows using WSL, you will have the SysV instead of systemd and you will get an error “System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can’t operate.” when you run the systemctl command.

If you want to know which init system you are using, you can use the command below to know the process name associate with PID 1:

ps -p 1 -o comm=

The above output tells you that your system is using SysV.

How to fix ‘System has not been booted with systemd’ error?

To fix the error, you need to use the equivalent sysvinit command instead of systemctl command.

This table will help you how to use sysvinit instead of systemctl.

Systemd command	Sysvinit command
systemctl start service_name	service service_name start
systemctl stop service_name	service service_name stop
systemctl restart service_name	service service_name restart
systemctl status service_name	service service_name status
systemctl enable service_name	chkconfig service_name on
systemctl disable service_name	chkconfig service_name off