Hello all,

I downloaded the Feisty Fawn Kubuntu distro yesterday and have to say I'm mightily impressed with it - installation was a snap compared with Fedora Core 5 and the graphics drivers are far better.

I have the desktop distro, but would also like to be able to run some server apps on the box remotely using vnc - therefore I'd like to disable the graphical startup and just boot to a shell with no user intervention. Two questions:

1) What file/startup setting do I need to tweak in order to do this?
2) Once this is done, do I run "startx" to bring up the KDE shell like I did with Fedora?

Once this is done, I should be able to run some of the office apps in a vnc terminal. Really looking forward to this!

Thanks in advance

Jim Stanley

to start in non graphical mode:

Check what run level you're using. IIRC, Ubuntu comes by default using runlevel 2. To check this, look for the line "id:2:initdefault:" in /etc/inittab. If the number is '2', you run at runlevel 2. If it's 3, you're running runlevel 3.

Depending on your runlevel, go to the appropriate rc dir - i.e. for runlevel 2, cd to /etc/rc2.d. If you're @ 3, cd to rc3.d.

In this dir, there should be a file called SXXkdm (or SXXgdm if you're using gnome, but if you're using Kubuntu, you should be running KDE - so it will be kdm). The 'XX' will be some number, in my case it's 13 - this is just determines the order in which the app is loaded at bootup, but is not important in this case.
If you want a non-graphical interface at bootup, delete this file.

If you ever want it back, simply relink the file, but be sure to remember that 'XX' number. To relink the file, go to this same dir and do a "ln -s ../init.d/kdm S13kdm".

Now once you're loaded & want to start up the X server, you can do it one of two ways, "startx" like you did before (which is arguably the correct way in this case), or you can start the x deamon by running "/etc/init.d/kdm start". With the former, when you log out, you'll go back to a non graphical interface. With the latter, you will go back to a graphical login like you have now.

*** None of this is really related to your ability to ssh in, vnc in, run server apps, or anything of that sort. I can't think of why you would want to do this, personally, but I suppose we all have our reasons.

Brian,

Thanks much. My system is at home, so I'll be applying this tonight.

As for reasons, yeah, well, it has more to do with the number of computers at my desk than anything else. I still have to use XP for a number of applications, both for work and home, but hope to do a lot more living in Linux. VNCing will enable me to put the linux box behind the desk.

OTTOMH, does the desktop version come with ssh or do I need to install it? I'll look at the services menu tonight and find out.

Thanks again.

Jim Stanley