Glenn Meehan wrote:
How do I make my system boot to a text based login instead of a gui log in window?
If you're wanting to make the change permanent, "apt-get [--purge] remove ?dm", where ? is w, x, k, or g, depending on which login manager you have installed.
If you're just wanting to make a temporary change, I put the line "exit 0" as the first executable line in /etc/init.d/?dm.
You can also just press Ctrl-Alt-F1 when you're at the GUI login; that'll take you to a console login, and leave the GUI login running "in the background" on VT7. You can get back to the GUI login with [Ctrl-]Alt-F7.
There are several other ways as well. (But changing the default runlevel in /etc/inittab is not one of them, unless you've hacked your Debian system to work this way.)
-- Kent