[clue-tech] Using a terminal/console for the desktop

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 11:39 -0500, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> Does anyone know of a package or way that I can turn the default 
> "desktop" (i.e. that thing that has a background and displays the 
> ~/Desktop folder) into just a console/terminal application?  I wasn't 
> able to find anything that does this on search.

You got lots of good answers for this, though the question isn't
completely clear on what you're looking for.  If you just want to
disable the desktop at boot time, so you have no graphical login (only a
text terminal), then just boot to runlevel 3.  To do this,
edit /etc/inittab (as root) and change this line:

id:5:initdefault:

to this:

id:3:initdefault:

Then either reboot or, as root, run this command:

telinit q

To get the graphical display back just undo that change to /etc/inittab
and reboot/telinit again.

If you want a graphical login screen that then leads to a text terminal
you'll have to use the fail safe login as your default (how to do this
varies from distribution to distribution) which should prevent GNOME or
KDE from starting and then place "xterm" in your $HOME/.xinitrc.   You
can't have a non-xterm terminal (one that looks like an ordinary virtual
terminal) because once X exits to get there, gdm will grab hold of
things and put the login screen back up.  So you can't go from gdm to a
virtual terminal but you can go from a virtual terminal to gdm.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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