Hi, i am running a mandrake 10.0 server.

Im still bit of a newbie to all of this so you might have to keep it simple for me.

At the moment i find that it can be a bit sluggish.

I was wondering if it is possiable to turn off the graphical desktop as default but still be able to turn it back on from a telnet session because it doesnt have a monitor, keyboard, or mouse on it.

Thanks for you help

If you're not actually using the desktop at any given time, then it will consume almost no resources.
To test this, leave it running, but log in remotely via telnet to a cmd line and run top.

ohhh yeah... thanks, most of it just goes to sleep.

I'll just have to get a faster comp. :-)

This seems a bit odd as you are running Mandrake. You can make it the hard way, check your /etc/inittab for the first script that is executed and keep following it until you find and remove the call to xdm, gdm or whatever the laucher is. This might break a couple of other stuff, as Mandrake is full of frontends to mess with the scripts. Or just grep the /etc for the gdm and try commenting it our. Future changes to the config will be a little harder, but it might work.


The easier way would be going for slackware or another distro that doesn't force X on you.