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Disabling X server autostart (gdm) on Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) Linux

Posted by Admin • Monday, November 16. 2009 • Category: Linux

There are many reasons one may wish to do this - running their desktop installation as a sever (temporarily perhaps), solving some video issues... or just doing it to get that facet of control back. I, for instance, prefer to run X with "startx" when I'm ready to do so. I do not enjoy a black screen when the latest intel video driver doesn't work - I'd rather Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and fix it.

Anyway, so Karmic (and apparently certain installs before Karmic, as well) uses an init system called "Upstart". If you've tried messing with update-rc and noticed that disabling /etc/init.d/gdm doesn't work, this is why. Oh sure, you can run /etc/init.d/gdm stop, but it's only temporary, assuming that works for you at all - for me it does not - my console does not recover and I get a black screen.

To get it to stop permanently the proper way is apparently to work with upstart. You'll notice some definitions in /etc/init (no, not /etc/init.d). These work somewhat like the Gentoo init.d scripts - you can define dependencies, events, phases, etc. So looking at /etc/init/gdm.conf I see: 

# gdm - GNOME Display Manager
#
# The display manager service manages the X servers running on the
# system, providing login and auto-login services

description     "GNOME Display Manager"
author          "William Jon McCann "

# I Commented these out:
#start on (filesystem
#         and started hal
#         and tty-device-added KERNEL=tty7
#         and (graphics-device-added or stopped udevtrigger))
#stop on runlevel [016]

emits starting-dm

respawn

script
    [ ! -f /etc/X11/default-display-manager -o "$(cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager 2>/dev/null)" = "/usr/sbin/gdm" ]

    # Check kernel command-line for inhibitors
    for ARG in $(cat /proc/cmdline)
    do
        case "${ARG}" in
            text|-s|s|S|single)
                exit 0
                ;;
        esac
    done

    if [ -r /etc/default/locale ]; then
        . /etc/default/locale
        export LANG LANGUAGE
    elif [ -r /etc/environment ]; then
        . /etc/environment
        export LANG LANGUAGE
    fi

    initctl emit starting-dm DM=gdm

    exec gdm-binary $CONFIG_FILE
end script


Notice that I commented out the start on and stop on lines. That took care of it. You can still start it with /etc/init.d/gdm start (or perhaps more correctly: initctl start gdm) but it won't start on boot.

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