On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 02:15:28PM +0100, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Scott Robbins wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 07:17:38AM -0400, Tom H wrote: > >> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 4:47 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > >> > > >> > Or edit /etc/inittab to boot to runlevel 3, or just init 3 from the > >> > command line (which you can reach via <ctrl><alt>-f1) or I think you > >> > can append 3 to the kernel line... > >> > >> That doesn't work on Debian/Ubuntu because runlevels 2-5 are the same. > > ?!?!?! 2 isn't much used, except as a set of steps. But 3 and 5 are the > same in Debian/Ubuntu? That's not like *any* other version of *Nix. > <snip> > mark Debian's configuration (at least wrt 3 and 5 being aliases for the same runlevel) is very similar to Slackware and Gentoo. The number and use of runlevels, traditionally, have not been defined (although the LSB has tried to address this) and different conventions have been used in various distributions (and, move widely, unices) - the use of 7 runlevels out of a possible 10 also appears to be more convention than any hard-and-fast rule. That said the convention used by CentOS does appear to be the most common (and closest to the LSB's definition) in use by Linux distros today. On System V and Solaris runlevel 5 is halt so you might get a nasty surprise if you were expecting X11! Laurence