Exiting GDM, switching runlevels ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

I just love this inherent capability of Linux's modularity, to apply
changes 'live' by restarting only reloading only the bits that are
affected by a change, instead of rebooting the whole machine.

There is a situation I don't know how to handle, though, hopefully
someone will know :

If I start in "recovery mode", to do whatever low level/sensitive stuff,
then when I am finished want to start gnome, I can't jsut start GDM. If
I do , Hoary is all over the place. Jeff Waugh said that "recovery mode"
+ GDM is not the same as starting in "normal" mode.

So, once in recovery mode, how can get the system to resume the boot
process and get me to Gnome "properly". What runlevel is "recovery
mode". How can swithc to the run lever used for "normal" mode ?
Or is "recovery mode", a special mode, and I need to reboot anyway ?

Now the opposite problem : say I am in "normal" mode, under Gnome. I do
some stuff, then log-out of gnome. How can I exit X/GDM and return to
the command line only ? In GDM there are options to reboot, power off,
log-in, but no option to exit GDM/X itself and return to a command line
only interface. 

Vince