Ok, this might sound ridiculous, but of all the issues I could have, I'm scratching my head over booting into text mode. Normally I'm in the opposite direction, such as startx
not working.
To put the wtf-level of this into perspective, I just managed to run Photoshop CS5 without problems (I'm trying to go into text mode to install nVidia graphics drivers).
Speaking of levels, the runlevels concept is confusing me; Debian seems to have a default runlevel of 2 - in the readme for the drivers it says such a runlevel would be text mode, and not even have networking (and that the "default" would be 5).
Just to clear that up, on this Debian, /etc/inittab
says:
# The default runlevel.
id:2:initdefault:
Then, I think about booting into "recovery mode", which is text-only. I have a gut feeling that's not the way to do it, as I'm not trying to "recover" anything, and I don't even know what changes in that mode.
So I google, and a post says I should edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg
. But that file says at the beginning:
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
#
# It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates
# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub
And I really don't feel comfortable editing a file that says that.
Then I find this other post, Debian-specific. Basically it says to go root and disable the login manager:
# update-rc.d -f gdm remove
I was just going to try that out, but some commenters disagreed, some saying I should move a file:
# mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm
Other put this in his .bash_profile
:
if [ "$(echo $(who am i)|awk '{print $2}')" = "tty1" ]; then startx;logout;fi
(don't ask me what that means) Somebody even mentions this as a solution:
# apt-get remove gdm
Could anybody tell me a sane, simple way of booting into text-mode on this Debian-based distro?