[mythtv-users] Ubuntu and Nvidia drivers - not quite to the point of tears

[Rod Smith]

On Sunday 04 February 2007 11:15, Charles H. Chapman wrote:
> > >> How on earth do I temporarily disable X through reboots?
>
> It's trivially simple!  Once you've booted up, at any command prompt
> (like an xterm window) type:
>
> /sbin/telinit 3

I may have missed something in intervening messages, but this reply is 
incorrect for two reasons:

1) The topic is on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu doesn't use runlevels to control
   whether or not X is started.

2) The question specifies disabling X "through reboots," which I take
   to mean that the OP wants X to remain disabled after a reboot.
   (OTOH, that's not really a temporary change; the phrase "temporarily...
   through reboots" is a bit of a contradiction.) Temporarily shutting
   down X via telinit, even on systems that work this way, will not make
   the change persist across a reboot.

On Ubuntu, to shut down X on a temporary basis (until the next boot), type:

/etc/init.d/gdm stop

In some cases, you might substitute "xdm" or "kdm" for "gdm" in this command, 
but I believe Ubuntu favors GDM, so it'll probably be "gdm". This won't make 
the change persistent across reboots, though. To make the change permanent 
(so that it persists across reboots), you've got to remove the gdm (or xdm or 
kdm) script from the current runlevel (runlevel 2 for a stock Ubuntu 
installation). There are several ways to do this. One pretty straightforward 
one is sysv-rc-conf. (You may need to install this package; it isn't 
installed by default, or at least it wasn't on my system.) Type 
"sysv-rc-conf" (without the quotes, of course) and you'll see a text-mode 
display indicating what SysV startup scripts run in each runlevel. Remove the 
gdm (or xdm or kdm) script from your default runlevel (which is probably 2), 
then press the Q key to exit. (There's no need to explicitly save the 
changes.) Any changes you make will not be implemented immediately (X won't 
immediately shut down if you remove gdm), but will take effect when the 
computer next boots up or when you change runlevels via telinit. When you're 
done with whatever requires text-mode-only operation, you can reverse your 
changes in exactly the same way and then start X by passing "start" rather 
than "stop" to the init script.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com