I have installed Debian wheezy on my machine with a netinst image, now I would like to deactivate the desktop and boot straight to the command line, not only that but I would like to not waste any resource on the X11/gnome/gdm at all if not needed.
I tried ( as root )
update-rc.d -f gdm remove update-rc.d -f gdm3 remove update-rc.d -f wdm remove
but Debian keeps booting into the login manager, I really don’t need that, how I can deactivate this kind of boot and start X only when needed ?
Answers:
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Method 1
Look in /etc/rc2.d/. There are probably links to /etc/init.d/xdm and /etc/init.d/kdm which you haven’t removed yet.
You can also edit the file /etc/X11/default-display-manager, which includes the full path to the default display manager Debian is using. If you replace the content of that file with /bin/true, you are probably disabling the start of any login-manager as well.
The TTYs are spawned anyways. If no login-manager is launched, TTY1 will remain the active TTY and you can just log in using the command line.
Method 2
For Debian 8 with systemctl:
systemctl disable gdm
Method 3
Actually for those who come across this looking how to disable login screen user list in Jessie the above comment about Debian 8 is incorrect at least as of today. To disable this in Debian 8 Jessie do the following:
$ sudo nano /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults
With the file open remove the # in front of the disable-user-list=true line as shown in the file sample below.
# Login manager options #====================== [org/gnome/login-screen] logo='/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/places/debian-swirl.png' fallback-logo='/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/places/debian-swirl.png' # - Disable user list # disable-user-list=true # - Disable restart buttons # disable-restart-buttons=true # - Show a login welcome message # banner-message-enable=true # banner-message-text='Welcome'
After changing press ‘CTRL+X’ then ‘Y’ and press ENTER to save the changes.
After you save the file run the following command to restart GDM and you will be prompted for your login.
$ sudo systemctl restart gdm3.service
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0