On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 2:49 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Finally, I've seen so many issues over the years, that at home, I run at runlevel 3, and have startx in my .bashrc. Doing it that way, if you have problems, when you hit <ctl><alt><bkspc>, you're back at your command line, and you can look to see what was wrong with X. If you do want to stay at runlevel 5, work it out this way, and once you've got it fixed, you can do so.
Agreed. If you edit /etc/intiitab and change: id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault: the system will not start X or a GUI desktop at bootup and you would log in in character mode. After logging in, 'startx' will start up X and your desktop session. I was hoping this might display a better diagnostic for whatever problem you have - and as Mark says you can easily kill it and drop back to the character mode session.