Booting into a lower run level.
 

I would like to boot up OS X into a lower run level, whichever slackware uses by default, I believe 3, thereby allowing me to start x (I have the apple X11 installed) manually and boot into fluxbox for a gui rather than the default OS X gui. I have fluxbox installed, but I don't know how to go about modifying the run level/default gui, i.e. OS X doesn't use the X windows, so I have no idea which files to edit or if I even can edit some sort of conf file to make this happen. Anyway, any help would be appreciated. Thanks again.

I suppose "Why would you want to do that?" is a meaningless question among computer geeks. ;-)

Have you pulled up a terminal window and done `man init`?

Apple has changed so many things that it's a little hard to guess what will happen compared to other systems. For example, during startup you can hold down various keys and it will do different things:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459

So, for example, command-s during startup will go into single user mode. Don't know if this gets you where you want to go, but maybe it's a start.

Yeah, I got screwed, got a macbook just before Apple integrated virtual desktops into os x.(They call it "spaces" and act like virtual desktops are something uncommon in a unix os, big surprise.) Though it looks like I might not necessarily be able to modify to run level since apple, and maybe other unix oses, don't use the same init file as Slack did. Oh well, we'll find out, I suppose.Thanks for the link, that might turn out to be pretty helpful.

inittab?
 

Apparently Mac OS X does NOT use runlevels like Linux. But, there are alternative methods for booting to a shell. Hopefully this is what you're looking for.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...=%2Fetc%2Fttys

Another link:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=203557