run levels are a sysvinit (Sys V Init) thing - and as you apparently run Devuan, which specifically uses sysvinit instead of systemd, then you you should be able to set up something suitable without X.org installed or with the display manager disabled?

As others have said, the implementation of run levels differs depending on the OS / Linux distribution in question. Historically, in Debian, run levels 2 - 5 (multi user) were the same by default (0 is halt, 1 is single user mode and 6 is reboot) - so booting to run level 3 there is not going to achieve anything useful - I believe Devuan is the same.

You seem to be referring to run level 3 in the Slackware sense, where it loads to a console (run level 4 loads a display manager). This doesn't apply elsewhere.

In Devuan you could either remove xorg and whichever display manager, or disable the service. To do the latter:

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable...rc.d.8.en.html

I'm trying to recycle some old laptops. Some of them have bad screens and, instead of replacing the screens, since I can operate in text mode quite well, I wanted to boot into runlevel 3 on them.





Thanks again, everyone for your suggestions. I haven't chosen a distro yet, but now I know which to look at.

blackhole , I knew I could configure several distros to boot into console mode, but what I was looking for was a distro that natively supports that mode because I cannot see any errors, as explained above, if I were to make a mistake or be missing something from the image I were to use, USB or optical.
Also, some distros are very GUI-centric whereas others are very console-centric.

I use Slackware and it boots to a console. Then I use startx to get to a GUI.

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All of them can boot into console mode.
In general the distros have server and desktop versions, and the server version boots into console mode by default and desktop versions boot into gui mode by default. But that can be changed too, you do not need to use the default (if you want to modify it).

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I'm not sure whether I've ever run into a bootable Linux CD, DVD or USB stick which didn't allow to specify special options on the kernel cmdline before proceeding with boot. Appending 3 to the cmdline has the same functionality to halt the boot in plain text terminal mode in every systemd distro I've used, just as it had with most non-debian distros in existence prior to systemd. With modern Debian and derivative distros with systemd, that equivalent arrived along with systemd. The official systemd way to so boot is with the option systemd.unit=multi-user.target, but 3 is so much simpler to remember and type.

You weren't following the conversation. I'm trying to boot some systems with dead/broken screens for headless operation as a means of reuse/recycling. If I can't see, I can't select the cmdline from the boot prompt.
Now maybe there's a key combo that will defiantly get you there, but IDK it.

Automated installer to some distro. I've had to repair computers blind or take an existing computer to copy keystrokes.