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/grub file, 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-grub afterwards 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
                    ;;

I wanted to change the default runlevel on my 9.10 Netbook Remix to 3, hoping to get a text-only login prompt.
I knew about the switch to upstart, so I did a bit of googling and I found this page, instructing me to change DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL in /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf.

But, after switching to default runlevel 3, gdm was still popping up.

That’s when I noticed this in /etc/init/gdm.conf:

start on (filesystem
and started hal
and tty-device-added KERNEL=tty7
and (graphics-device-added or stopped udevtrigger))
stop on runlevel [016]

Adding runlevel 3 to the stop on directive did the trick, but apparently only when I passed the runlevel via bootloader.
The correct action was to specify the exclusion of my new default runlevel on the start on directive.

To sum it up:

in /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf:
env DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=3

in /etc/init/gdm.conf:
start on (filesystem
and started hal
and tty-device-added KERNEL=tty7
and (graphics-device-added or stopped udevtrigger)
and runlevel [!3])
stop on runlevel [016]

Gotta love this transition to upstart!!!

Update: this seems to work on 9.10 desktop.

I have to confess a serious case of love-hate relationship with Ubuntu. The more I get suspicious about it and its makers, the more gracefully it runs on all my hardware. I think it does that on purpose. Just like last time, when I upgraded from 7.04 to 8.04, I was secretly hoping the upgrade would leave me with a heap of smoking ashes. And, just like last time, the process went as smooth as silk.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by KDE 4.1. I didn’t like, or even understand, most of what I saw of the first dot zero releases, but I sure like what I see now. Of course there is a lot of eye candy, which I don’t care about in the slightest as long as I can disable it (I can’t afford it on my relatively slow hardware, and losing cycles for no good reason tends to bother me anyway in the long run). But it feels like there also is a lot of sensible stuff behind the scenes. I’m still playing around, but most of what I’ve seen has been improved. I always thought KDE was a terrific piece of software; this new release surely carries on the good tradition and probably ups the ante.

Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t had my little problems. The Alt+F2 thingie that used to be called MiniCLI has now been replaced by this wonderful new thing called KRunner. I like it very much, but it seems to have a nasty bug, it does not store settings nor the command history. This is a big pain, since I use the thing a lot. I see the bug has been fixed in SVN, I hope the fix gets to binary soon.

Also, VLC video output defaults to XVideo extension, which seems to cause a major screwup with my graphics card (Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02), xserver-xorg-video-intel X.Org video driver, version 2.4.1 whatnot). After a handful of seconds of video play, the display goes completely berserk and there is no way to get anything back but doing the Three-Finger Salute. Forcing VLC video output to OpenGL fixed the problem. And by the way, VLC 0.9.4 totally rocks.

I had to uninstall NetworkManager since it messed with my wireless card and my own scripts. OK, I have to be honest here: me and NetworkManager, we don’t get along very well. I don’t like it and the feeling seems to be mutual. No big deal, I can’t be friends with anyone, can I.

I think I made this point myself here before.

I’d just stress the difference between real communities and corporate manoeuvres (hints: mambo, joomla). It’s obvious that the whole free software community needs more of the former and less and less of the latter.