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