Initng is a full replacement of the old and in many ways deprecated sysvinit tool. It is designed with speed in mind because it does as much as possible asynchronously. In other words: It will boot your unix-system much faster, and give you more control and statistics over your system.
Installation
Installing InitNG is a snap.
Debian/Ubuntu packages are available
here.
Get the newest version (currently 0.5.2-1) and install it with dpkg:
sudo dpkg -i initng_<version>_i386.deb
Now you have to configure your boot-manager (GRUB) to use InitNG.
Open /boot/grub/menu.lst in your favorite text-editor (with sudo!) and create a new boot-option by copying your current configuration und appending "init=/sbin/initng" to the kernel line.
Your new entry should look something like this (bold text was added to my original configuration):
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-686-smp (initng)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-686-smp root=/dev/hda3 ro quiet splash init=/sbin/initng
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-10-686-smp
savedefault
boot