Aldous Huxley wrote:
Yes, I already knew that trick. It's just that sometimes I need to back out of X completely to free up system resources to allow me to play mp3s using console-based players like "splay". So I'd like to be able to boot into X login, then back out of X when I'm through "working", free up that precious memory (64mb total) and play some music and use other console-based progs too.
if you have enough swap then lot of X (and X clients, if any) will be swapped out, that might be enough, just make sure you don't have X programs running that do something on their own (like browser with flash plugin animation etc.)
So is there a way to prevent X from always restarting?
as others pointed out it is restarted by display manager (probably gdm, kdm or xdm), apart from stopping the display manager you can also:
- remove it completely, start X on demand by startx, when you exit X it won't be automatically restarted
- use update-rc.d to not automatically start [xkg]dm (and use startx to start X only when you want X)
erik