On 10/27/2014 05:59 AM, Ruben Safir wrote:
How can I set the system up, (13.1) so that it starts up without X11 and then start it by hand when I need to. I tried to do this but the changes to X11 make it very difficult.
What works for me ... I just swapped my old disk into a new desktop, as I mentioned in a recent post, and I knew ahead of time that X would not work at boot because of a different video chip on the mobo. So I wanted to boot without X11 coming up, get a terminal, log in as root, edit the xorg files and try starting X11 manually. This is what I did. Normal bios boot into grub. F2 and told bios about the new disk etc etc. F10 to save and reboot. Grub2 started and I got the menu. Pressed escape to get into the editor. Moved down to the command line that started up line and just after the 'root=...' I typed in the number 3 surrounded by spaces. I then pressed F10 to save and execute. The system came up in what used to be runlevel 3 and is now, according to systemctl "multi-user.target". I was presented with a login prompt. I logged in as root and did the editing. Since this was multi-user I hot keyed (ctl-alt-f2) to the second vt. I logged in as 'anton' and ran 'xinit'. The screen flashed and flashed and flashed and I was back at the prompt. Buqqer! Ctl-alt_f1 back to root; cd to /var/log and looked at Xorg.0.log. Re edited the xorg files. Back to the 'anton' login and tried again Success. TA-DAH! So there I was with login prompt at each of vt1-vt6 as needed. I can think of two other ways of getting there as well. The first is to simply type "init 3" at the root prompt. The second is to log out of X. The login screen offers the ability to go into terminal mode and kill off the X server. I've tried both these alternatives and both still give me logins on vt1..6 Why did I simply insert "3" and not some magic string for systemd saying "multi-user"? Cos I'm lazy. What can go wrong? I can think of many things that can go wrong, but if you start from the POV of antagonism with systemd then you aren't going to approach the debugging very sensibly. There is in /etc/systemd/system some basics. First see that default.target is a link to /usr/lib/systemd/system/runlevel5.target. That should give you a BIG CLUE. If you look inside that, you'll see that its a unit file that says the multi-user target is a dependency. That needs to come up first. Well whoopee with that! You can also see getty.target.wants/ and in there is the unit for starting the vts. Two important things. Well three actually First: ALWAYS READ THE DOCUMENTATION ! ! ! ! (Maybe that should be "The Zeroth law") Second, you might not have any vts to start. That's a configuration option. See logind.conf(5) for details Third, the unit descriptor has a reference to http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/serial-console.html That's the documentation for the 'getty' stuff. Under the subheading "Virtual Terminals" there is a description of how the virtual terminals are started ... On demand. See also: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt On quite a few other occasions I've brought the system up as 'runlevel 3' and always got the vt1..6. Its quite reliable. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org