How do I boot into console mode (redux)

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04. This question was asked some time ago, but the answers didn't work for me.

The standard way to boot into console mode used to be to edit /etc/default/grub and set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text". This worked fine until I ran the fix proposed in SoundTroubleshootingProcedure, in order to get sound to work.

Since then, I have disabled the boot-splash-screen, but I can avoid what I presume is the lightdm login prompt screen. All I want to do is disable this gui and be prompted with a console login prompt. (Shouldnt be so hard should it???) I read in three 33416 mentioned above that there was a bug in lightdm (it wasn't recognizing "text" properly as an option for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.) But this discussion happened more than a year ago, and it's surely been fixed. Yet my lightdm is uptodate (so I'm told when I try to update it with apt-get).

As suggested in one of the above, I tried sudo update-rc.d -f lightdm remove which resulted in a hung machine. I managed to recover using recovery mode, but now I still get the gui again.

Another suggestion is to edit /etc/init/lightdm.override. I've done this and set it to "manual" as suggested, but lightdm simply ignores this.

Could somebody suggest how to proceed please?

Thanks very much, Leo

---

I have also tried commenting out the start on stanza in lightdm.conf, and it does nothing.

The find command gives nothing

Here's proc/cmdline:

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-33-generic root=UUID=efda276f-9afa-49d6-9e59-f62c015cd09a ro text

Answer 1

I think this steps will solve your problem:

First you need to edit /etc/default/grub and set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to "text". This will make GRUB boot in text mode (without Plymouth). After this you should run in a terminal

sudo update-grub

If after rebooting you still see lightdm, you need to disable it. Use the two options you used before: creating /etc/init/lightdm.override with only the text "manual" in it and use sudo update-rc.d -f lightdm remove. If it still boots then you can try doing sudo chmod +x /etc/init/lighdm.override, but i guess this will do nothing.

If after reboot you only see a black screen the problem is that your system is booting you in tty7 (if you press Ctrl+Alt+F1 you should see a login prompt). If you are using "text" in GRUB this should not happen, but if it does then it must be a bug (i already heard 11.10 had it, but now should be fixed.)

Edit

Another way (not so clean) to disable LightDM in Upstart is commenting the start on stanza in /etc/init/lightdm.conf (this is from 12.10, in 12.04 the file could be slightly different):

# LightDM - light Display Manager
(...)
author      "Robert Ancell <robert.ancell@canonical.com>"

#start on ((filesystem
#       and runlevel [!06]
#       and started dbus
#       and (drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
#            or stopped udev-fallback-graphics))
#      or runlevel PREVLEVEL=S)

stop on runlevel [016]
(...)

Give it a try. If it doesn't work you can always restore it.

Answer 2

I finally solved this problem. After the patch described above was installed, lightdm.conf was not being read at all. Rather gdm.conf was calling lightdm! I copied into gdm.conf the lines in lightdm.conf that checked cmdline.conf for the word "text" and bailed if these words were found. Then everything worked the way it should.

But what a crazy patch!!! Why would anybody set things up this way???