I don't know what is up with our servers, but each time I upgrade Linux or switch back to Windows it seems that the default providers have changed,and as such I'm having trouble finding out how to change the default run level from 5 to 3 in Ubuntu 10.4. I had tried the /fstab file, and although the last time I made this configuration was under Suse, I'm not even sure that's how I did it for OpenSuse. I did find how to pass the text argument to the kernel but I don't want to disable GDM so that I have to renable it everytime I login. I'm unsure of how this will affect the startx command, at which point I'll be stuck sifting through books for random commands that might perform the task I would like.

To elaborate, the reason I'd like to switch my default run-time level is so that I can configure an nvidia proprietary driver, which requires that the x server not be running and I could switch tty's but that doesn't shutdown the x server and although someone had given me a key combination to the effect of ctrl-alt-backspace,backspace I was advised against using it as it might cause damage to the integrity of the data used to load gdm.

Thanks.

what is a provider??

Default runlevel is defined in /etc/inittab or just put the number on the kernel options line by itself. Well, I assume it works for all runlevels, certainly does for 1.