how to boot without X

[John]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> 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).

That is your opinion. Judging from Red Hat's server configurations and 
the tools RH has written to support the server configurations, there's a 
substantial body of users who disagree with you.


I've installed and use servers with and without X. I make my choice 
according to the circumstances of the particular server.


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

I participated in the testing of Taroon, the beta of Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux.

One of the other users complained that neither the workstation nor 
enterprise versions met their needs because the use they wanted was a 
shared concurrent-user (hundreds, thousands - I don't remember but lots) 
workstation with all the server software.

I myself have used my Athlon that way. I would categorise such a system 
as a server; certainly it's not a personal system, whether desktop or 
workstation.

Your POV is valid, but others have goor arguments for their views too.


> 
> 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

It still remains in common use. I quite like the choice, and an 
implementation like the one adopted by Red Hat (and copies by others) is 
one where users can easily exercise choice and change their mind at each 
boot if they want.


> 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.

I even used to run X on my 8 Mb 486. Not as my normal desktop, it's 
true, but sometimes.