I was wondering is there anyway to disable the GUI from running at
startup...? The reason is that I have a laptop that I use everyday and if somebody steals it I don't want them to get a pretty little Gui ,I want them to see the Cold but beautiful Bash Shell

Thanks

The Penguin stands tall

Set the default runlevel (in /etc/inittab, see the initdefault line) to 3 instead of 5, that should help. Runlevel 1, 2 and 6 are "reserved" (reboot, single-user and shutdown), but 2-5 are more or less normal runlevels. Usually 5 runs graphical server by default, along with a graphical login manager, and 3 doesn't - so it sticks to the console login. It may differ, though..

You change runlevels (in a booted system) with
you can try it and see if X shuts down, then you've got the right level. Don't do 'init 1' nor 6, as they're not ordinary runlevels. Changing the runlevel is done by editing (like I said) the /etc/inittab and changing the runlevel number in the initdefault line, then rebooting.

But if they couldn't log in, it didn't matter, and if they could, they could always run 'init N' to switch to runlevel N, thus getting to the graphical login.

Thank you that helped
My personal expirence is that when a person see a gui they
can guess what to do. But when they see a terminal they can find their A** with both hands and a map.

The Penguin stands tall