I wanted to boot Xubuntu in console mode. Found online how to do it by modifying the grub default file and changing parameter from "splash quiet" to "splash quiet text" and then doing a grub update. But it doesn't work, I still boot to GDM.


How do I know if my system is using GRUB or some other bootloader?

If you've got the grub files hanging around, I suspect you probably use grub (and grub's default for Xubuntu, so unless you've changed it yourself...)

In my experience there are many of ways to do it, and it will vary from distro to distro. I would have a look in /etc/inittab and see what you can find in there, as well as trying to put a '3' on the end of your boot line (ie. "splash quiet 3").

However, if you just wanted to get to a console, you can Ctrl+Alt+1 to one, or even run "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" to shut down the X server

Hope this helps,

Easiest way to determine grub version is "grub-install -v".
But I agree with Snark - if you've got that file you updated, you've got grub2. I didn't think adding "text" like that would work, but it did (I added it at the grub prompt, rather than default).
You would need to do "update-grub" (note the hyphen), and run it as sudo to ensure the update was accepted. Simply checking /boot/grub/grub.cfg will tell you if the update-grub worked.

Did you get some grub2 on your computer, I thought you were die-hard legacy user.

ROTFLMAO ...
Am I that obvious ...

I like to keep up with things. On Mint Debian I allowed it to install grub2 - but I chainload it from grub legacy (Fedora 15) ....

Be aware that using "text" for this is likely to be distro specific - in Mint this is (currently) parsed in /etc/init.d/gdm3, and at the various runlevel rc?.d for gdm.