How to login without using X?

**lilohatea** · 07-27-2005

Hi, everyone. New to the forum and new to Debian.

Can someone please tell me what to set to enable me to login to the command prompt and not start X?

I am running Debian Sarge, 2.6 kernel, booting with Grub.

I thought that it was /etc/inittab but setting the runtime there isn't preventing X from starting.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

**alain_** · 07-27-2005

There are several ways to do this,
i presume you are using gdm, if not replace gdm by kdm in the answers.

* take the x bit off -> chmod -x /etc/init.d/gdm
* remove gdm -> apt-get --purge remove gdm
* comment the gdm line in /etc/X11/default-display-manager

option 1 and 3 are very usefull if you want to leave gdm on your system.
with option 3 you will get a notice that gdm was unable to start (weird

)

**a thing** · 07-27-2005

su
cd /etc/init.d
mkdir ../init.d.backup
ls (locate all display managers like kdm, gdm and xdm)
mv kdm ../init.d.backup
mv gdm ../init.d.backup........

**hamburger123** · 07-27-2005

You can append a 3 to the end of the line that says "kernel..." in your grub.conf file or when you boot up

**bigtomrodney** · 07-27-2005

You could use those methods, but an easier way would be to edit /etc/inittab You just need to change the section where it says default runlevel from 5 to 3.

Code:

# /etc/inittab&#58; init&#40;8&#41; configuration.
# $Id&#58; inittab,v 1.9 2001/05/31 10&#58;37&#58;50 knopper Exp $

# The default runlevel.
id&#58;5&#58;initdefault&#58;

# Boot-time system configuration/initialization script.
# This is run first except when booting in emergency &#40;-b&#41; mode.
si&#58;&#58;sysinit&#58;/etc/init.d/rcS
...........## inittab continues on - trimmed for brevity

So edit

Code:

id&#58;5&#58;initdefault

to be

Code:

id&#58;3&#58;initdefault

You will still have multi user functionality and full networking.

**bigtomrodney** · 07-27-2005

Originally Posted by lilohatea

I thought that it was /etc/inittab but setting the runtime there isn't preventing X from starting.

Sorry I completely missed that. Did you edit it as above when you "modified the runtime" ? Ubuntu has the nasty habit of having x at all runlevels, but I see you're using Sarge. Can you post your /etc/inittab please.

**nomar** · 07-27-2005

What you really need to do is remove gdm (or kdm or xdm, which ever you use) from your start up sequence.

you do so like this, as root:

# update-rc.d -f gdm remove

This is the correct way to this.

**nomar** · 07-27-2005

...by the way, whn you want to start X afterwards you can do so,
as root you can start gdm to log in like so:
# gdm
or
# /etc/init.d/gdm start

alternatively when logged in as any user you can just
# startx

to take you straight into your desktop environment.

If you ever want to reenable gdm then:

# update-rc.d gdm defaults

**budman7** · 07-28-2005

Originally Posted by bigtomrodney

You could use those methods, but an easier way would be to edit /etc/inittab You just need to change the section where it says default runlevel from 5 to 3.

Code:

# /etc/inittab&#58; init&#40;8&#41; configuration.
# $Id&#58; inittab,v 1.9 2001/05/31 10&#58;37&#58;50 knopper Exp $

# The default runlevel.
id&#58;5&#58;initdefault&#58;

# Boot-time system configuration/initialization script.
# This is run first except when booting in emergency &#40;-b&#41; mode.
si&#58;&#58;sysinit&#58;/etc/init.d/rcS
...........## inittab continues on - trimmed for brevity

So edit

Code:

id&#58;5&#58;initdefault

to be

Code:

id&#58;3&#58;initdefault

You will still have multi user functionality and full networking.

This would work on alny distro with the exception of Debian. I just tried this with my /etc/inittab in Debian Sarge.

Code:

id&#58;3&#58;initdefault&#58;

# Boot-time system configuration/initialization script.
# This is run first except when booting in emergency &#40;-b&#41; mode.
si&#58;&#58;sysinit&#58;/etc/init.d/rcS

# What to do in single-user mode.
~~&#58;S&#58;wait&#58;/sbin/sulogin

# /etc/init.d executes the S and K scripts upon change
# of runlevel.
#
# Runlevel 0 is halt.
# Runlevel 1 is single-user.
# Runlevels 2-5 are multi-user.
# Runlevel 6 is reboot.

As you can see, I am at level 3. But when I booted up, the Gnome Display manager came up, not CLI. Which should have come up.

**bigtomrodney** · 07-28-2005

That's mad! I have to know why now. Does anyone know what Debian does that's different in this regard?
As you can see I was running Knoppix at the time, which is obviously Debian based. Though I admit I only pulled the file I did not make the change. If anyone has any more info on this I would be interested to know!

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