Comments on: Howto Boot debian in text mode instead of graphical mode (GUI)

By: Matt Gilbert

Matt Gilbert — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:20:11 +0000

I’m a long time slack user, but I thought I’d give debian a try on a spare machine I have. I installed Debian 6.0.3 and I found this page and did the update-rc.d -f gdm3 remove thing and it worked fine and rebooted to CLI no problem, and startx starts the GUI no problem. See the man update-rc.d page Note that I used gdm3 and not gdm, as there is no /usr/bin/gdm but there is a /usr/gdm3 so that did it. Before that I battled with getting rid of Grub and it’s EFI and UUID crazy anti-bios stuff did a proper /etc/fstab and replaced GRUB with LILO, This may turn out to be a pretty decent system after all.

By: RJB

RJB — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:23:32 +0000

It looks like this is long outdated. Probably this should be updated by admin.

The following is not helpful advice for those who want to keep gdm, but not autostart it on boot, but is useful for those installing Debian for the first time:

Use the basic install. Don’t install X or any GUI applications on your initial Debian installation.
Don’t install GDM or gnome.

Install only the GUI stuff you will actually use and start anything you need to start by making entries in your user .xinitrc file, then use ‘startx’ to launch.

If want gnome and gdm, but don’t want it to autostart, then the /etc/rcX files are the place to go. Do some exploration in each new version of Debian (or Ubuntu, or Linux Mint…) to find out where these are.

By: rtoledo2002

rtoledo2002 — Tue, 17 May 2011 01:31:24 +0000

the post above that talks about

mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

needs to be updated for debian 64 6.0.1 TO

mv /etc/rc2.d/S22gdm3 /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

and this worked for me tody with a fresh install in Oracle’s VM 05-22-2011

By: Dave Oliphant

Dave Oliphant — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:42:02 +0000

This worked for me; I have been searching on the web for several days on how to boot up linux mint 9 x64 into a cli text mode but nothing has worked. But this worked!!!!
How groovy is that!?!?

Thanks a bunch for something that actually worked.

Dave

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 02:42:14 +0000

I had the same trouble as you marco. I’ve removed gdm like it’s said here but at reboot … still gnome launched -.-
thank you marco for the solution

this topic should be updated by admin ^^

By: CrazyA

CrazyA — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:16:57 +0000

Marco: Thank you very much. I finaly got back home so I could try it, and it works like a charm!

By: Marco

Marco — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:10:50 +0000

CrazyA, I solved it. You need to open the /etc/default/grub file, locate the following line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and change it to: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text" and don’t forget to run ‘update-grub’ afterwards to update.

By: CrazyA

CrazyA — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:59:27 +0000

Marco: I had exactly the same thing. For now, I’ll just deal with it and leave it eating up resources while it shouldn’t…

By: Marco

Marco — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:28:32 +0000

I tried to run “update-rc.d -f gdm remove” as root but didn’t have any effect, on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit: the computer still boot in graphical mode.

By: Wolf

Wolf — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:43:27 +0000

Hi All, but really I’m confised reading all that post on this thread, was looking to only remove permanently the gui start-up from my Debian and get a lot of misleading information. Even after trying undate-rc.d gdm remove I get the following output: update-rc.d: /etc/init.d/gdm exist during rc.d purge (use -f to force)

So what’s that?
Sure I have to reboot to see what happen after my first attempt to get gui startup out.
Maybe after someone will give a short and clear statement to this post, other can really get usefully info.

Thanks

By: Ayekat

Ayekat — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:10:51 +0000

Why not just:
apt-get remove gdm
???

Then it is gone for good!

Sorry, I’m probably just some newbie speaking bad english, but everytime I remove Gnome, GDM or even just Epiphany, Debian tells me that a huuuuuuuuge amount of programs aren’t needed anymore.

And then, if I type apt-get autoremove, Debian starts removing every GUI component of the system.

By: Stan

Stan — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:35:50 +0000

Why not just:
apt-get remove gdm
???

Then it is gone for good!

By: valsj

valsj — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:08:42 +0000

nice. very helpful

By: acohen36

acohen36 — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:00:46 +0000

mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

Yep, Sam Morris’s su easy edit works like a charm every time.
Also goes great together with the other ?dm’s kdm and xdm

By: Delian Krustev

Delian Krustev — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:17:18 +0000

Reading a headline like this could made someone believe debian is more user friendly than ubuntu .. I think it is more appropriate to set the title to:

How stupid should I be to make a machine start directly in X .. especially in debian ?

“The correct way to disable a service (such as GDM) from being started in a given runlevel (e.g., 2 which is Debian’s default runlevel) is like so:

mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

Further information can be found in /etc/rc2.d/README.”

Is it ? May be you should consult the manual page of update-rc.d ..

$ ls /etc | grep “^rc”
rc.local
$

How about /etc/rc2.d not existing at all ?

sysv-rc sucks the big time ..
If you want the states to be preserved you should replace sysv-rc with file-rc . Something everyone should do.

Just my 2 BOFH cents ..

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:45:12 +0000

Autologin:
you will want to apt-get remove gdm, kdm, xdm, wdm
and apt-get install rungetty afterwards open /etc/inittab and modify this line 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 to
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/rungetty tty1 --autologin $user

Now edit and to your /home/$user/.bash_profile

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then
while [ 1 == 1 ]
do
startx
sleep 10
done
fi

By: mzilikazi

mzilikazi — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:55:42 +0000

There is a nifty tool called rcconf that can manage run level symlinks for you. Using this tool it is not required to enter each rc*.d dir and manually rename a symlink. It speeds things up a bit.

By: Guti

Guti — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:59:49 +0000

Very nice article.

By: Sam Morris

Sam Morris — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:47:23 +0000

I believe this will result in the login manager being enabled again the next time it is upgraded. update-rc.d is *not* for administrators to use -- it is only for package maintainer scripts to use to install their startup links.

The correct way to disable a service (such as GDM) from being started in a given runlevel (e.g., 2 which is Debian’s default runlevel) is like so:

mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

Further information can be found in /etc/rc2.d/README.

By: Mathias Bernhardt

Mathias Bernhardt — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:26:50 +0000

Hi!

I usualy boot into text-Mode. I also have this line in my .bash_profile:

if [ "$(echo $(who am i)|awk '{print $2}')" = "tty1" ]; then startx;logout;fi

So when i login at the first Terminal then the windowmanager is started via .xinitrc. I like this much more than all the gdm/kdm/xdm stuff because it uses only MY configs and not those of any admin and the x server is started by the user who’s actually using it.