[CALUG] How do I get out of X?

[Chris Edillon]

On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 12:25 -0400, Jim Sansing wrote:
> John Alan Hastings wrote:
> >Browne at t-online.de wrote:
> >  
> >>Hmmm, guess I haven't needed to do this since quite a few
> >>releases ago.  I'm trying to upgrade my graphics driver
> >>(to NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run), which means
> >>I have to get out of X.  As I recall, there was always a menu
> >>option at the login screen to log in without X running, but now
> >>with RH AS3, I see no such option.  Killing X, and everything
> >>that looks connected to X, only results in it automatically
> >>restarting.   init 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 (it doesn't seem to matter)
> >>just causes the machine to reboot all the way back to run
> >>level 6.  What obvious solution am I missing?

  nothing, running "init 3" should do the right thing.  if this
isn't the case, it sounds like the box doesn't have a default
configuration for init.  and i think you probably mean that the
box returns to runlevel 5, since 6 is the runlevel the machine
enters to reboot. (that can be fun, btw, setting someone's default
runlevel to 6 and watching the excitement :)
  at any rate, your machine may be set to run X in more runlevels
than the default of 5.  look in /etc/inittab for a line that looks
like this:

x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

"respawn" is what causes X to restart when you kill the server.
if the second field has something like "345" in it, init will
run the X server and graphical login in runlevels 3, 4, and 5
instead of the default of just 5.

> >It doesn't sound quite right.  Init 3 should take you to full multiuser
> >with net but without X.  Init 4 should be undefined and I don't know
> >what it would do.

  on a newly-loaded RedHat/Fedora box, runlevel 4 is most likely
identical to runlevel 3 in terms of what services are started
in that runlevel.  if you subsequently add software which hooks
into the init sequence, it probably gets added only to runlevel 3.
i say "most likely" 'cause i don't have anything to look at other
than my fedora box at the moment, but i don't recall there being
any real differences between runlevels 3 and 4 on a RedHat box in
quite a while.

> There should be a boot option, but I have never been able find out if
> it is 'init=n' or 'runlevel=n' or something else (anyone? ;~).
> 
  just add "3" or whatever runlevel you want to enter to the
kernel arguments at the grub prompt, similar to adding "s" when
you want to enter single user mode.  using "init=" will tell
the kernel to run whatever program you point to instead of
/sbin/init.

> # runlevel 2  is  Local multiuser without remote network (e.g. NFS)
> # runlevel 3  is  Full multiuser with network

these almost sound like Solaris definitions.  the network
stack itself is on in both 2 and 3, although NFS and its
companions aren't.  here's the list of differences on a
default fedora box:

acpid                   2:off   3:on
atd                     2:off   3:on
autofs                  2:off   3:on
cups-config-daemon      2:off   3:on
haldaemon               2:off   3:on
kudzu                   2:off   3:on
mDNSResponder           2:off   3:on
messagebus              2:off   3:on
netfs                   2:off   3:on
nfslock                 2:off   3:on
nifd                    2:off   3:on
portmap                 2:off   3:on
rhnsd                   2:off   3:on
rpcgssd                 2:off   3:on
rpcidmapd               2:off   3:on
xinetd                  2:off   3:on


chris