How do I boot to a text prompt?

wswartz · 11-27-2004, 10:35 PM

I've got an old Dell 266 laptop that I put FC2 on but in X, it's dog slow. I don't necessarly need X for this machine so I'd like to make it boot up in text mode. I know I could do this if I reloaded the OS and tell it not to load gnome or KDE, but I'd like to keep the X around (just in case...).

How do I make it boot up in text mode?

BS

wmakowski · 11-27-2004, 10:48 PM

Look for the following line in the file /etc/inittab.

id:5:initdefault:

Change the 5 to a 3. This should make it boot in terminal mode.

Bill

wswartz · 11-28-2004, 02:40 PM

Thanks! That worked fine...

WS

Optimistic · 11-28-2004, 05:02 PM

If you really want X at somepoint in the future, you might be able to if you switched distros. Slackware is great with older hardware--I run it on an old Dell CPi (300MHz) and it runs fine. Takes a while to load OpenOffice, but other than that it is fine. Just max out the ram to as much as the board can handle. Oh, and Fluxbox or other light WMs help a lot. Rox-filer, xfe, stuff like that.

wmakowski · 11-28-2004, 09:27 PM

I spotted this thread just yesterday and it has me thinking about trying either Vector or DeLi distributions on an older PC. It mentions that DeLi is based on Slackware 7.1. Worth a read if you are interested in getting X running on older hardware.

Linux for Old PC's

Bill