Yes I agree with Hans, you can change the default runlevel to 2 which gives you a terminal then when you are ready, run gdm3 (starts X automatically) or 'sudo init 5' to load the default window manager.
Do some research into init runlevels and I think it will help you a great deal with a lot of things.
Am Mittwoch, 3. Mai 2017 schrieb Hans :
Am Mittwoch, 3. Mai 2017, 09:20:33 CEST schrieb Francesco Pietra:
For testing purposes just move gdm out of the way, Just move /usr/bin/gdm to /
root, when everything is working fine, move it back.
So you have a good way to test and go to default later.
You can also try to force initlevel (I do not know, if this is still working
in debian), so it will not run into rc5 (with X) but to rc2 (no X). I guess,
there are people who know better than me, which runlevel is without X.
I did this 10 years ago and forgot about it.
Hope this helps
Best
Hans
> Hello:
> I would be happy to learn about a safe way to boot amd64 debian8 (gnome3)
> and debian9 (xfce) to terminal, followed by startx and either gnome-session
> or what is correct for xfce. My older method of killing gdm does no more
> work well. Booting into gui is often giving problems in scientific use of
> linux. My interest is in:
>
> -- Examining all that is loaded during boot
>
> -- Working from the terminal without gnome/xfce when running
> number-crunching codes.
>
> Thanks a lot for advice
>
> francesco pietra