I've been searching for an answer to this question on and off for about 5 years now, and have yet to find an answer. How do you shut down a running X11 server? The damn thing is like a hydra! If I kill it, it respawns, which is great if X becomes unresponsive, but doesn't help when I'm trying to install updated NVIDIA drivers, which require that X11 not be running. In the past, I've gotten around this problem by turning off X11 at boot and rebooting, but this is a less-than-ideal solution for a number of reasons:

1) I run Linux because I don't want to reboot every time I make a minor change! If I liked to reboot, I'd have stuck with Windows.
2) I can't figure out how to turn off X11 at boot under Ubuntu 5.04 :P

I've tried killing the process, halting X11 with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, etc., but it always respawns, and I'm right back where I started. Is it possible to stop X11 once it's running?!? And can we get this into a freakin' FAQ somewhere? (Can you tell I'm getting frustrated?) Inquiring minds really want to know!

- Stealth Dave

Depends on the distro ... in slack I'd type
init 3
or
init 1
depending on what I did to my /etc/inittab

Have you tried?

Both init 3 and init 1 restart the system (but not reboot), which also restarts X11. Back to square one.

- Stealth Dave

In that case ubuntu sucks big time ... want this thread to be
moved to the ubuntu forum to get the right people to look at it?

Plain old debian behaves properly when put into runlevel 1.

Have a look at your /etc/inittab and check what the box
does when going to runlevel 1

grep "^su:" /etc/inittab



Cheers,
Tink

In Debian-based distros (this includes Ubuntu), the X11 login managers (xdm/gdm/kdm) are not directly in /etc/inittab - they run as a service in /etc/init.d.

So you can turn it off with "sudo invoke-rc.d kdm stop". You can also switch the runlevel to one without a login manager service to make it more permanent, or use a runlevel editor to remove xdm/kdm/gdm from your runlevel of choice.

From the Ubuntu Wiki, you can stop the X server like this (I think...):
There is a very detailed guide to installing the nVidia drivers in Ubuntu here @ UbuntuGuide.org.

ctrl-alt-backspace > new login

Did you even read the first post???

That shutsdown X