I am trying to get Fedora to run under VMWare. I have Fedora installed and running fine under VMWare. However, to install some VMWare tools I have to run a script that will ONLY run when XFree is not running.

How can I shut down the X server? In the past I have jsut used init 3 to shutdown X but unfortunatley this locks up the system under VMWare.

Is it possible to shutdown X in a different way?

Is there a file I can edit to prevent X from starting the next time I boot Fedora?

Thanks
Shawn

X can be stopped with cntl-alt-backspace

to stop from booting into X, edit /etc/inittab and change the line that begins with

id:5:blahblahblah

to

id:3:blahblahblah

and reboot. NOw you'll boot into runlevel 3, and to start X use:

startx

Good luck,

ctrl - alt - f1 then login as root and do "init 3". That totally kills the xserver. To get back into X, just do "init 5" as root. The method described does not totally kill X, it just restarts it if you are running your system on runlevel 5 (init 5).

using init 3 kills my system however so I can not run that command.

i don't understand what you mean when you say init 3 kills your system. It should kill the xserver, then you are left in text mode with a login prompt.

I am running Fedora with VMWare. It s a way to running multiple operating systems under windows. For some reason VMware is crashing fedora after I type the init 3 command. It locks up part through trying to switch to that run mode. I do not know why.

So I am looking for and alternate way of stopping the Xserver.

I modified the inittab like jeffreybluml suggested and it worked out great.

Thanks

I see so it could be a vmware problem and not Fedora problem coz the method i posted above works fine on native Fedora installations.

Hi.

I'm pretty new to Fedora but I'm a fairly competent Linux user but I'm having the exact same problems as described above.

I'm trying to install the latest NVidia driver in which I need to quit the X server to do. When I do Ctrl + Alt + Backspace, The computer crashes and never recovers. Now ... I tried the init 3 thing and now my linux installation wont even boot! It gets stuck at the login page which I'm sure its attemping to run some form of command line interface.

I'm just wondering if theres any way I can recover from this?

Cheers

Steve.

I am having a similar problem, but when i type init 3, it hangs after anacron. I just need to stop x server! shouldnt be this hard...

ok, well...when I try ctrl alt f1, it goes to text, but the nvidia driver install still tells me that xserver is running and that i need to shut it down.