How to temporarily stop and start Gnome?

Question

I am looking to just force my box to end all GUI instances for server usage. I want to be able to start them back up again for desktop usage later on.

I have tried:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
sudo service gdm stop
sudo service gnome stop
sudo service gdm stop gdm: unrecognized service
sudo service gnome stop gnome: unrecognized service
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop sudo: /etc/init.d/gdm: command not found

Answer 1

Precise Pangolin uses lightdm instead of gdm, so something like the following should work.

sudo service lightdm stop

Answer 2

To stop lightdm , you can do

sudo stop lightdm

to start lightdm

sudo start lightdm

Source :LightDM