On 2016-09-11 at 17:04, Harry Putnam wrote:

> How can I arrange to boot to console mode rather than X.   With the
> ability to startx when I feel like it.
> 
> I'm not familiar with grub2 and the debian vm I'm using on a solaris
> host appears to be using grub2.
> 
> Can anyone stear me to the files I'd need to edit?

Unless you actually want to be able to get to the graphical login
prompt, I don't believe you need to mess with GRUB, the bootloader, or
the initrd at all.

The way I usually do it is to uninstall gdm, kdm, xdm, et cetera; those
are the packages which hook in to provide a graphical login prompt. With
none of them present, what you get is the traditional text-mode login
prompt, and your configured shell after login.

From there, assuming other permissions are configured correctly (which I
seem to recall may take some tweaking, under the systemd paradigm),
'startx' should work normally. It may or may not pick up your desired
window manager; I believe the Debian Way to specify that is to select
one as the preferred alternative for the 'x-window-manager' link group.

If you do want to keep one or more of those packages present, or if you
want to do this more explicitly / manually, you'll probably need to look
at those packages and figure out what it is they do to hook themselves
in as the login prompt. I haven't investigated exactly what they change
in order to do that, so I can't directly help you there.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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