Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems
Random Entry: Getting ETVnet.com to play video on Ubuntu
< Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala breaks X (xorg) on intel driver on 945G chipset | MySQL replication dies with ERROR 1201 (HY000): Could not initialize master info structure >

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.

0 Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry
  1. No Trackbacks

0 Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)
  1. No comments

Add Comment


Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

What is the primary language of this blog? (Anti-SPAM question)


Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.