[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu without booting into X

[Bob Blick]

I just put Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop, and I'm trying to figure out the
best way to stop it from booting straight to X.

First I thought I'd use Synaptic to remove gdm, but it threatened to
remove the package "ubuntu-desktop" and that seemed a little extreme.
But it's been years since I used Gnome so I don't know if that's new
behavior.

Then I turned off gdm in "Services". That worked, but when I'd start X
with "startx" I would not be able to do anything that required superuser
creds, including "Services".

If I started X with "sudo gdm" I pretty much got a normal X experience,
but some things are missing like the user-switching thing that displays
your name at the upper right. I also felt uneasy having to use sudo to
start gdm.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Bob



-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service