I installed 3.1 r2 with desktop and Apache. I don't want X to start at bootup. I would prefer to get the original text-based Linux login, and be able to do a StartX from the console.

I searched the board and newsgroups and couldn't really find anything that helped.

Thanks in advance!

I believe what you want to do is use update-rc.d to remove starting x from rc2.d (runlevel 2 is the default runlevel for Debian). I would give you the exact command to type, but I've not used the command in quite some time...

There wouldn't be much of a point to me learning Debian if you held my hand.

Between that and some other stuff I've been poking at, we'll see what I can do (or mess up).

Thanks!

view inittab, by the way.. Maybe it's easier to make 3 default runlevel?

In Debian, runlevels 2-5 are the same by default.

Tried that. It no workey.

I found something in a newsgroup and ended up adding a

to the very beginning of the /etc/init.d/gdm file. Even better cause now I can choose either the Desktop Manager (by typing "gdm"), or my default X (by typing "startx") from the command line.

You could do the same with removing link with name matching S*gdm in /etc/rc.d/rc<runlevel>.d . By exit 0 you just tell the script to stop. I didn't know Debian doesn't make difference for runlevels by default... I thought better of Debian (X running from initscript at runlevel 3 is not my favorite setup).

I tried that too. As a newbie, I could be wrong. So please feel free to correct me. But here is what I gathered:

There is no /etc/rc.d/ directory (anymore?). Debian Sarge uses a set of directories /etc/rc<n runlevel>.d. So, under /etc/ you will find directories:

./rc0.d/
./rc1.d/
./rc2.d/
./rc3.d/
./rc4.d/
./rc5.d/
./rc6.d/
./rcS.d/

(At least, that's exactly how my system looks).

Within those directories appear to be a seperate set of scripts. I have a base install with Xwindows and Apache. My rc2.d directory has 19 files in it. One of them is called, "S91apache2", and I assume that initializes the Apache HTTP server upon bootup. If I look at the contents of that file, one of the very first comments is:

I searched all these scripts looking for gdm and couldn't find it. So I don't know how Debian is starting the desktop manager at bootup.

Look rcS.d also.

In my sarge install, the gdm symlink is /etc/rc2.d/S99gdm and it links to /etc/init.d/gdm

Note that if you installed a different desktop than Gnome, it might be S##kdm or S##xdm.

Okay, I found a tool that might be helpful for you, aptitude install sysv-rc-conf. It's an ncurses based interface that lets you use the space bar to set things to run in the different runlevels...

My bad... you're right... all those files in the /rcn.d/ directories are symlinks... not scripts.

Either way... the "S99gdm" symlink points to /etc/init.d/gdm.... the file that I modified to keep Gnome Desktop Manager from starting upon boot.

Your script change sounds fine for what you're doing. But now if you wanted to have a default runlevel that did boot into x automagically, you couldn't have it because the change you made would affect all of the multiuser runlevels.

There's always more than 10 ways to skin a cat, but if you're going to be a system admin, you should probably try to do things in a standard way in the event someone else has to admin the system later on... Just my

Good point. Although I'm not planning on becoming a Linux sysadmin... I do like to keep things scaleable. Plus, I work on Winblows systems now. Who knows what systems I might end up on in the future.

At any rate... I've only dabbled in Linux before (Red Hat, and I didn't like it). I'm really trying to get my hands dirty now. So I might as well learn the 10 different ways to skin the cat so I know which is best for different applications.

Thanks all!