creating a CLI session

[Michael Moore]

Note: You said you want text-mode only, so I'm assuming you know a bit
about the command line. If any of this isn't clear, feel free to ask.

> sudo aptitude remove gdm
>
> ..that will leave the gnome files there but the graphical login screen
> & gnome launcher will never load automagically anymore.

This might not actually be such a good idea. Removing GDM would delete
the GDM package files, not just disable graphical log on. Also, I'm
almost positive that the ubuntu-desktop package depends on GDM, which
could mean that there would be update/upgrade issues in the future.

In my opinion, you'd be best just disabling the graphical login manager script.

To disable the graphical logon, you'll need to open a terminal, and run:
sudo chmod -x /etc/init.d/gdm
This changes the mode (chmod) of the the program /etc/init.d/gdm to
non executable. To re-enable graphical logon, you'd just make it
executable again like so:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/gdm


To run graphical login only once, you can run "sudo bash
/etc/init.d/gdm start". The "bash" command will let the program (a
bash script really) run even though it's not executable.

To choose at boot time, I would add a short script to the end of your
.bash_profile file that asks if you want a graphical or text session.
Based on your answer, it could then run the graphical command I listed
above, or just exit (leaving you in text mode).

Hope that helps,
-- 
Michael Moore
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