How to boot without the X window system?

Gary Stainburn gary.stainburn at ringways.co.uk
Thu Apr 22 15:06:43 UTC 2004


On Thursday 22 Apr 2004 4:05 pm, Charles Landau wrote:
> >Elvio Caruana wrote:
> >>Charles,
> >>
> >>When X starts and fails, press CRTL+ALT+F1 to go to console mode.
> >>Log in as root, then edit /etc/inittab with your favourite editor.
> >>
> >>You probably didn't know that you can go to a console by
> >>CTL+ALT+F[1-6] .. and that will solve you many problems.
> >
> >*He said he can't boot.  Thus he can't edit inittab*
>
> Right. I actually did know about CRTL+ALT+F1, but once in console
> mode I don't get a login prompt.
>

In that case, have a look at /etc/inittab. You should see something like

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

once per vertual console, usually from 1 to 5 - it may be that console 1 is 
missing. This is common to prevent it stamping on bootup messages.  Try doing 
CTRL+ALT+F2 instead.

> >The easiest way is at the fedora splash menu
>
> In my case that would be GRUB.
>
> >press "a"
> >
> >then add "  3  " to the end of the line and boot to run level 3.
>
> Thanks, that works. Now I'm able to start debugging my X problem.

This is designed as a one-off solution. If you want a perminant solution, edit 
/etc/inittab as described in other posts.

>
> >Now you can do what is needed to get X to run, simply use "startx"
> >to test it and "ctr-alt-bksp" to kill the server for the test.
> >Once it is running properly just reboot back to the graphics mode.

-- 
Gary Stainburn
 
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