disabling of XWindows start on ubunt

[Tom H]

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 3:04 AM, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On 06/05/13 16:08, Nils Kassube wrote:
>>
>> What do you mean with "you need to be a level #1"? If you select "root"
>> in recovery mode, you are at a root shell where you can type the given
>> command. Then the root file system will be remounted rw (if possible).
>> There is no special skill needed (except knowing the command). Another
>> option to get the root file system remounted rw would be to choose the
>> option "network", where you will be warned that the root file system
>> will get remounted rw and other file systems will get mounted also
>> according to /etc/fstab.
>
> I admit that I haven't been following the thread too closely and the
> significance of the "recovery mode" escaped me for the reason that I have
> never had to resort to "recovery mode".
>
> I would simply boot my system in the normal manner but at the grub menu I
> would enter "init 1" on the boot command line and would then be taken to
> user level #1 where I would issue the command, as root, "mount -o remount,
> ro /dev/sdXy" (followed by "e2fsck /dev/sdXy" to have the file system
> checked, which was the only time I ever used this procedure).

The difference between recovery mode and single mode is that, since
12.04 (and perhaps earlier), recovery mode appends "recovery" to the
"linux" grub line rather than "single" and that leads to mounting "/"
ro whereas when "single" is appended to the "linux" grub line, "/" is
mounted rw.

If we were still running grub1, we'd be able to set up the automagic
system so that "update-grub" would create three different options for
each kernel, "standard", "single", and "recovery", but grub2's removed
that flexibility. :(

"Traditionally," you could boot with "/" ro by appending "-b" to the
kernel's grub options but I've never tried it with upstart's
"/sbin/init". Assuming that "-b" still works with upstart, it must
enable less "stuff" than "recovery" does because when I've used "-b"
on Debian, I've had to use sysrq to reboot.