Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” has been released, and what I wrote in my last post is still relevant.
I did another search to find another good way to boot the OS in text mode, getting rid of gdm at boot.
Inbetween several instances of advice like removing /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm, which does not exist any longer since gdm has been moved to upstart, or getting rid of gdm altogether by uninstalling it, which I didn’t want to do, I found something interesting in a comment to an article:
You need to open the
/etc/default/grubfile, locate the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"and change it to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text"and don’t forget to run
update-grubafterwards to update.
In more general terms, you may want to add the text parameter to the GRUB entry for which you want a text-mode boot. Changing the default GRUB command line postfix, which is appended to all entries, rather than changing a single entry, seems like a brutal solution, but it is also the quickest, and may be just what you want.
A little bit of explanation: the upstart script /etc/init/gdm checks the kernel command-line for inhibitors such as text, and quits if it finds one:
for ARG in $(cat /proc/cmdline)
do
case "${ARG}" in
text|-s|s|S|single)
plymouth quit || : # We have the ball here
exit 0
;;
While the headline speaks for itself (
I’ve got a truckload of unfinished posts in draft status, and absolutely not a drop of will to finish any one of them. So I will give in to the latest quick thought, waiting for better times.
cat >/dev/null is 
