Booting up to command-line on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick

Pope Kim Jan 17, 2011

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I've finally installed Ubuntu 10.10 over the weekend. My main motivation for installing Linux (first time in my life) was to have a test server for web programming I'm doing for fun. Since I really didn't care about Linux GUI, I installed Ubuntu Server as a base and installed ubuntu-desktop(apt-get install ubuntu-desktop) top of it, which made everything ugly: whenever I boot up, it showed GUI login screen (GDM)…. yuck…

So I tried to disable GDM.. I did a lot of google search, but all the tips I got from the web didn't work for me. I suspect those tips work for older versions, or direct Ubuntu Desktop installation. Finally, with my linux/unix guru buddie, Daniel's help, I managed to achieve this in a correct way. :) This is how I did:

  1. edit /etc/init/gdm.conf ("sudo vi /etc/init/gdm.conf" for me)
  2. change where it says:

    start on ( filesystem

    to

    start on (runlevel [5]

    filesystem

  3. change

    stop on runlevel [016]</span>

    to

    stop on runlevel [01236]

Apparently this makes all the run level same as Unix…. (On the web, there was another suggestion to achieve this by changing only stop on runlevel [0126]", but this was giving me a boot-up freeze….)

so there you go, if you have same problem with me, hopefully this will fix your problem :)