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Re: How to switch to text mode

cga2000 wrote:

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 12:42:27PM EST, Andrei Popescu wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:02:57 -0800
Freddy Freeloader <fredddy@cableone.net> wrote:


Andrei Popescu wrote:

On Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:18:26 -0800
Freddy Freeloader <fredddy@cableone.net> wrote:


LOL.  I suppose that's a solution.  However, I occasionally do
some browsing when Googling answers to problems on those machines
so being able to fire up the gui easily is sort of a must. 

If you are just googling for answers and unless you have a _very_ fast
machine, a text browser such as elinks will take you to solutions a lot
quicker than any gui.

After I subscribed to a reputedly fast broadband connection, I didn't
see any improvement over dialup whatsoever as far as _browsing/surfing_
was concerned.  Suspected some dns problem, intially .. but no .. it was
just the incredible sluggishness of mozilla's rendering that was the
problem.

And elinks does know how to invoke a viewer for those rare .jpeg's etc.
that might be relevant to the problem/solution.. 
No popups .. no commercials .. no flash shock waves et al..

Your choice.


And what's wrong with startx?

Regards,
Andrei
Who said there is anything wrong with it? I didn't. Like I said originally, I guess I just do things a little differently than most do. 
There is more than one way to do it, of course :) I was merely
suggesting an alternative and just 'try startx' would have been too
"dry" (at the moment I can't think of a better word in English).

Here's another option also relevant for your initial query. Delete the
symlink for gdm, but only from runlevel 2. If you want gui then just do
'init 3'.
Actually I wasn't the OP'er on this thread. I just commented on how I dealt with booting into a text console by default, but leaving myself a way of starting a gui if I desired to use one occasionally. I do most things from a text console, but when I start Googling for information I like a graphical browser. I've tried a couple of text-based browsers and just didn't care for them. 


Doesn't the magical Ctrl+Alt+F{1-6} key combo take you back to a text
console when you already have an evil *display-manager running on
vt{6-12} .. ??

Or is the OP simply dissatified with xdm, gdm, kdm, wdm, & Co. and has
decided to switch back _for good_ to a more sensible "start X" solution?

Thanks,

cga.
I can tell the difference in browsing speed on my machines if my ISP's network gets congested, with Mozilla or Firefox. If browsing slows down to anywhere near dialup speeds I can ping the local gateway for a couple of minutes and see latencies that are consistently much higher than normal every time. I don't have all that fast of a connection, 3 mb/s, or very fast machines, 1ghz Pentium 3's on my old servers. The reason I wouldn't run a gui by default is that these old machines don't have a lot of memory in them, and a gui eats a lot of resources so I only use one occasionally and then shut it down after I'm done using it. I prefer using a cli most of the time because it's more flexible and powerful in many respects than a gui, but some things, like a browser, just seem more natural as a graphical interface to me. Maybe it's because I didn't start computing with DOS or Linux, but with a gui.
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