Debian Questions

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Sun, Aug 03, 2008 at 12:33:30AM -0400, Robert Spangler wrote:
> First, I am a little  
> bothered that the system didn't let me opt out of installing Grub; I  
> wanted to install Lilo.  I hit ctrl+C at that screen, hoping that I  
> would be put back at the main menu where I could select this.  The  
> manual says to hit the go back button or whatever but I was unable to  
> tab to any buttons.  So I went ahead and let it install Grub then it  
> rebooted. 

You can still do
apt-get install lilo
, and that should get rid of grub for you, and install lilo instead.

> It rebooted, however, into Gnome!  Some how I managed to get  
> to a console and set the default boot level in inittab to 3 thinking  
> this would boot me in console mode. 

No, by default debian's runlevels 2-5 are all the same.

> I rebooted and it did not.  So how  
> can I make it where I only have Gnome when I ask for it? 

What I do personally, is to leave gnome as is, and I just switch to
the first text console after boot, if that's what I want. This way, I
get the best of both worlds whenever I want them. If you want to
disable gnome from coming up after boot, and simply be placed at your
first text console after boot, you should be able to remove gdm with
apt-get --purge remove gdm
, and get into gnome if you still want it with
startx
from the text console. I think this info is correct, but I do stand to
be corrected if it turns out not to be. Another alternative is to
customize one or more of the runlevels, so that they start/stop what
you want them to. Someone else will need to help you with that, or
you'll need to read up on it yourself, since I haven't had the need to
customize runlevels in debian.

> Also, how do I  
> switch between Gnome and the console? 

You have the text consoles available on tty1-tty6, with gnome running
on tty7. So, if for example you've just booted up, and are sitting at
the gnome login screen, hit ctrl+leftalt+f1 for the first text
console, ctrl+leftalt+f2 for the second, and so on through 6. If you
want to get back to gnome, ctrl+leftalt+f7 should do it.

> Thanks.

You're welcome.

Greg


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