Comments on: How to disable X or GUI on boot in Debian

By: JD. Brown

JD. Brown — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:24:25 +0000

Or, if you just need to temporarily disable runlevel 5, you can get rcconf from the repositories and type it in bash to disable GDM/KDM from starting on next reboot. I use it primarily to install ATI and Nvidia drivers. It’s a very handy tool.

By: riri

riri — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:37:32 +0000

Ok, sorry

By: Takla

Takla — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:41:31 +0000

Riri: you could even read the article

By: riri

riri — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:36:00 +0000

You can use this command for disable a script on runlevel :
# update-rc.d -f gdm remove

By: Takla

Takla — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:23:10 +0000

Runlevel 2 in Debian still starts all kinds of services such as GDM (on a machine with a desktop environment), hal, dbus, cups etc etc. because all the multi-user runlevels are by default identical, or perhaps ‘awaiting configuration’. This can be checked on a default install.

In each and every one of the start up scripts in /etc/rc#.d/ you’ll find the line ‘# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5′

You can edit inittab or grub’s menu.lst to set runlevel 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 but you won’t see any difference unless you also edit those scripts, as you describe above. sysv-rc-conf is a really simple effective way to present and manage the runlevels. The only time I can see that manually editing/renaming the individual scripts has an advantage is if you need to change the sequence of service start ups within a runlevel, which is quite unusual.

By: Alves David

Alves David — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:13:00 +0000

Nice, but you could also set the initdefault to 2 (in /etc/inittab)

# The default runlevel. id:2:initdefault:

Note that when setting inittab to 2, deamons stratings at > 2 are not started.

By: Takla

Takla — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:47:34 +0000

Perhaps the easiest way to manage start up services and run levels in Debian is with the use of either/both sysvconfig and sysv-rc-conf. sysv-rc-conf allows the admin to easily select/deselect services for each runlevel, while sysvconfig is cruder and allows the admin to select/deselect services, the changes being applicable to all runlevels. Both are ncurses applications and very simple to use. They’re in main.