How can I change the default setting to boot into text mode
 

I am new to Ubuntu, and haven't been able to figure out what to change to boot into text mode by default. I know in Red Hat you can just change a setting in the inittab file, but I haven't found a file by that name in Ubuntu. I don't want to switch to a virtual terminal after booting, I want to be able to see the boot up messages. I also don't want to have to select recovery mode either, since I'm not trying to recover anything. Does anyone know how to do this?

On Debian you would delete the link in the /etc/rc2.d directory to the graphic startup usually either S99kdm or S99gdm for KDE/Gnome login managers perhaps it is the same in Ubuntu unless they have changed it. This would probably not do anything for you to see the boot messages though I believe that they use a grub boot splash which would still be running until it hits the startup of X then you would get a console when X startup fails. I think the themes/boot splash have a key you can hit when it is running to show the messages you might want to check for this to do what you want too.

No Ubuntu at hand at this momemnt, but I think Ubuntu boots into runlevel 5 by default. The file to remove refers to gdm.

If you want to see bootup messages, change grub (file menu.lst somewhere in /boot) and remove 'splash' and/or 'quiet' from the entry that you use to boot; you can test it first without doing permanent damage by editing the bootmenu when it appears during boot.

PS Ubuntu nowadays uses something called upstart to determine what needs to be done.