Mint noob has a couple of quesitons

explorer · 03-03-2011, 02:22 PM

I setup Mint for the first time today, (have been using Mandriva for years). It's going to be a samba server / Windows domain client machine. So far, I'm happy with the ease of making things work but I haven't been able to figure out a couple of things and would appreciate some assistance.

1. How can I configure Mint to boot up to a console (text screen) and not start the graphical desktop ? On rare occasions when I need the desktop, I would like to be able to do a "startx" from the command line, but I don't want the gui starting automatically.

2. Where is the menu.lst file ? I've searched /boot and all subdirectories, plus the entire hard drive and have not found it.

I am using Mint 10 KDE - 32bit

Many thanks

PrinceCruise · 03-03-2011, 03:04 PM

Hi,

Mint10 uses Grub2 where bootup files are entirely different in this case. I use Mint9, but I uninstalled grub2 and installed grub for my ease of use

.

Here is the Ubuntu Grub2 documentation, may help :

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

Good luck.

explorer · 03-03-2011, 03:23 PM

Thanks princesharma. Answers question 2 pretty good.

Now I just need to find out how to keep the gui desktop from auto-starting.

PrinceCruise · 03-03-2011, 03:34 PM

In /etc/default/grub, I suppose you need to edit something in this line :

Quote:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

* This line imports any entries to the end of the 'linux' line (GRUB legacy's "kernel" line). The entries are appended to the end of the normal mode only. This is similar to the "defoptions" line in menu.lst. For a black screen with boot processes displayed in text, remove "quiet splash". To see the grub splash image plus a condensed text output, use "splash". The entry "acpi=off", if required, would also be an option entered on this line.

I'm not sure though.

explorer · 03-03-2011, 05:05 PM

Thanks again princesharma. I can get a console (text mode) login at the login screen by selecting from the left round button below the password input box, and I can log in as a regular user. A number of problems are there though, no networking or samba, and the graphical desktop starts by itself after a few minutes which defeats the whole purpose of a console session. As soon as the desktop starts, networking and related services also start. Booting into single user mode gives me root access only. This might not be the distro I want to use as a server after all. Makes a nice desktop though.

syg00 · 03-03-2011, 09:49 PM

Mint isn't aimed at the non-GUI user. Could be done, but why bother ?. Have you thought about using something like Ubuntu Server ?. You can always add the desktop if you really need to.

k3lt01 · 03-03-2011, 10:22 PM

+1 to syg00's response although I would recommend Debian 6 for a server and if you want to have the Mint extras you could add the Mint repo that LMDE uses. To do this add this line to your sources.list

Code:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main backport import upstream romeo