I Don't Understand RunLevels
 

Hey guys whats up, I was fooling around on my box and changed the inittab along with emerging gnome-light. Pretty much all I changed was the /etc/inittab runlevel from 3 to 5 to get a gui login. Well it works but something is broken about the login, its just a bix X and gray background and I login and dont get anything. So I tried to change it back to 3 and still get the gui. I can change it to 1 and get the text login but no internet, obviously.

I told you all that so you can understand alittle about the situation, basically what I want again is just to have the normal text login (runlevel 3) but when I change it to 3 i still get the XDM (i think thats what it is) If anyone knows anyother files I have to edit to get it going back to runlevel 3, I've been reading through all the files related to startup but maybe I missed something. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Gentoo 2.6.15-r1

first, please clean up the language....

When changing inittab, are you re-booting? If so, and you still have problems, check to see that the file is really changed (maybe an issue with saving??)

I reboot everytime I changed the inittab file, and I still get XDM and it even says during start-up that "Entering runlevel 3" but I still get the GUI xdm.

That's from the Gentoo "X config howto" doc - which along with a Gnome paper is in the "desktop Doco". I'd suggest you spend some time there.

As to your problem, sounds like you also added xdm to the default runlevel. Just take it out to lose the GUI login.

Ok, So how exactly do I go about stopping XDM, I mean i can run "/etc/init.d/xdm stop" but that just stops it for the current session. How do I 'umemerge' xdm because I think now that your telling me all this, I remember emerging xdm and I think that command embedded xdm into my runlevel. So how can I fully remove xdm? Or what command will fix this problem?

emerge would not have added xdm to runlevel 3, you must have done that. It's been a while since I've ran Gentoo but look check the man page for rc-update and use that to remove xdm from the default runlevel. Something like this, maybe a Gentoo user could correct my syntax here?

Close - "rc-update del xdm default". Leave the runlevel off to delete it from all levels.
As suggested, hit the man page.

"rc-update show" will tell you if you have added it to a runlevel.

Thread and title cleaned up.