Paul E Condon wrote: <snip>
This is just a hint that I hope is helpful: To keep the Xwindow system from starting during boot up, remove all the various versions of 'display managar', these are xdm, kdm, gdm and a few more whose names I do not remember. These are the programs that start X and give you a graphical user logon screen. You can get rid of them with apt-get remove ... . What you do next to achieve your goal is more difficult. First, see what this suggestion does for you, then ask more questions here.
Thanks, Paul. I made a renamed copy of initd/xdm. Then wrote a new xdm that did nothing but echo 'dummy xdm' and returned 0. This left me in the terminal and able to use startx. I then entered Gnome as root.
-- Blessed are the cracked: For it is they who let in the light.