how to boot without X

[John]

Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi David!
> 
> (Rerouting to the list)
> 
> On 2004-10-05 16:37 +0100, david wrote:
> 
>>I think my question has been misunderstood.
>>What I mean is this, is there a way I can, from the initial boot screen,
>>pass options to the bootloader that will boot the base system but not
>>X ?
> 
> 
> None that I know of.
> 
> 
>>Editing anything in system to achieve this is not what I'm after.
> 
> 
> Sorry, but without editing anything nothing will stop the gdm init
> script from being executed. So either you have a "Non-X" runlevel or
> you modify /etc/init.d/gdm to scan the kernel parameters (which you
> can edit in grub and can be seen in /proc/cmdline) for a magic word
> and exit if it is found. The latter solution could even be implemented
> by default, if a general concensus about this is reached.
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
A runlevel in which X doesn't start is the way others do it. It's a way 
that users coming from other distroes are familiar with and I recommend 
it be done in Ubuntu.

"configuring" gdm via kernel parameters seems to me especially grotty, 
and I wonder how one might start {g,k,x}dm after boot if it's going to 
parse /proc/cmdline and refuse to start.


fwiw SuSE and Red Hat _only_ start the display manager automatically in 
runlevel 5.

I have one system that locks up whenever I run KDE (KDM or a desktop) on 
the hardware. Booting to (Red Hat's) runlevel 3 would have been fine - 
everything except KDM would start.