Does Ubantu use run-levels?
Of course it does, it's a Linux :-)
But "everything" runs at all available run-levels, by default.
The only difference between "X" and "text" is the invocation of gdm (or possibly kdm if the system has been dragged into the kde world), so you can always remove the gdm invocations from /etc/rc*.d. Future package upgrades might put this back, I'm not sure. But Ubuntu 4.10 Warty has no package upgrades save security ones.
If the system is dual-booting surely lilo or grub will permit logging on
in text mode?
You probably could start in single-user mode, or just let it start up normally and switchback to a text console.
The problem with "Linux" is that so much user-instruction is based on the specifics of the distribution that it comes with.
-jim
