On 2016-09-11 at 17:04, Harry Putnam wrote: > How can I arrange to boot to console mode rather than X. With the > ability to startx when I feel like it. > > I'm not familiar with grub2 and the debian vm I'm using on a solaris > host appears to be using grub2. > > Can anyone stear me to the files I'd need to edit?
Unless you actually want to be able to get to the graphical login prompt, I don't believe you need to mess with GRUB, the bootloader, or the initrd at all. The way I usually do it is to uninstall gdm, kdm, xdm, et cetera; those are the packages which hook in to provide a graphical login prompt. With none of them present, what you get is the traditional text-mode login prompt, and your configured shell after login. From there, assuming other permissions are configured correctly (which I seem to recall may take some tweaking, under the systemd paradigm), 'startx' should work normally. It may or may not pick up your desired window manager; I believe the Debian Way to specify that is to select one as the preferred alternative for the 'x-window-manager' link group. If you do want to keep one or more of those packages present, or if you want to do this more explicitly / manually, you'll probably need to look at those packages and figure out what it is they do to hook themselves in as the login prompt. I haven't investigated exactly what they change in order to do that, so I can't directly help you there. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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