How to Boot CentOS in CLI?

Question

I have a CentOS 6.2 OS which boots into GUI. How, upon startup, can I not boot into the GUI and instead, boot into the CLI? I want to do this at computer startup time.

Answer 1

When you are at the GRUB menu where you select which OS to boot (if this menu don't appear, press ESC while you get the "Booting CentOS in X seconds"), press e to edit your boot commands. You should see a screen like this: (parameters may vary)

Look for the line that begins with kernel. Choose it and then press e again. You will be at a simple editor, add 3 to the end of this line. This means booting in runlevel 3, which is text-mode only.

To make this stick: edit /etc/inittab and look for a line that begin with id:5. Replace the 5 in that line by 3. You can find a brief description of runlevels here, but shortly:

• Runlevel 0 and 6: halt and reboot the machine, respectively.
• Runlevel 1: No services running, only root can login.
• Runlevel 2: Users can login but no networking.
• Runlevel 3: Networking and text-mode.
• Runlevel 4: unused.
• Runlevel 5: GUI.