How do I boot to a command line interface instead of a GUI?

Question

Hi I have ubuntu server 10.04 installed and I also installed the following:

su
aptitude install xorg xfce4
aptitude install <name of GUI browser, I use firefox>
aptitude install gedit
aptitude install gnome-terminal

Now when I restart the system it goes to the GUI login, what I am really after is a system that loads the CLI by default and then I can use startx to load the GUI when really necessary. I am trying to learn CLI but I would like to retain access to the GUI for now. And, how can I switch between CLI and GUI anytime?

Answer 1

Modify your file /etc/default/grub with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

and do sudo update-grub. The machine will boot in text mode.

To start the graphical interface you do

sudo service gdm start

Edit

Starting from Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric, the default Display Manager is LightDM, so the preceding command becomes:

sudo service lightdm start

Answer 2

You can either set the display manager, gdm (for Gnome)/kdm (for KDE)/etc, to not start on boot, or you can just remove the packages.

To prevent the display manager from starting, run:

sudo update-rc.d -f remove gdm   #For Gnome
sudo update-rc.d -f remove kdm   #For KDE

or, to remove the display manager:

sudo apt-get purge gdm           #For Gnome
sudo apt-get purge kdm           #For KDE