On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 2:49 PM, <m.roth at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com