how to boot without X

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 05:58:54AM +0800, John wrote:

> There are other reasons to not run a display-manager at boot. Some like 
> a GUI on their servers, but that's not to say they want to start a 
> display manager on boot. Most of my servers are headless, but a GUI 
> login is possible using VNC.

Servers should use a custom install, not the desktop install, and so they
won't have a display manager installed by default (or indeed, even an X
server).

On a desktop, the display manager should always start except (optionally) in
a recovery situation.

Servers have no need for a display manager in the first place, but if you
install one, it should start by default.

The concept of a "text-only" runlevel is a holdover from early days of Linux
when the graphical environment was often too heavy for commodity hardware,
and the user community had a much more traditional UNIX flavor, and so many
users preferred to work from a command line on the text console unless they
needed to use something exotic like a web browser.

-- 
 - mdz