how do i remove X?
 

i need to remove or disable X windows from my new distro (KateOs) cleanly
any ideas?

Why? I'm not sure what "disabling" could mean - you can just exit. If you mean you're stuck in that display manager login thing, then 'killall DISPLAY_MANAGER' as root from a virtual console (or, I guess, from an xterm). Change your runlevel in /etc/inittab to whatever isn't a graphical login runlevel to make it permanent. Otherwise, you should simply be able to exit. If you want to get rid of it, I imagine you'd use whatever package manager KateOS uses.

I believe kateos is based on slackware.
If you mean, booting in console-only mode all you need to
do is edit /etc/inittab and change the runlevel default to 3.
Check the top of the file: the comments should tell you which
levels are which.
In slackware 3 is 'multiusers,network,text-mode' and
4 'multiusers,network,X'
You edit the line for default runlevel to read:
id:3:initdefault:

The easiest way to configure the system so it comes up in text mode is to edit /etc/inittab. Change this line:

to this:

Done. And reversible as well.