Re: Starting and stopping gnome

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 09:57:14AM -0500 or thereabouts, Steve Buehler wrote:
> 	I am running RHEL ES 4 and was wondering what startup file says to 
> 	start gnome?  Sometimes I would like to switch back and forth from the 
> command line and gnome after a reboot.  It would actually be nice if I can 
> turn off the automatic start of gnome and be able to just type in a command 
> from the command line to start it if I wanted to run it.

Are you the only/main user on the machine? Because there is 
certainly a way to do this, but other users might not appreciate
it. 

There's a series of "run-levels" the machine goes through when
it boots. (And the numbers assigned to them can vary with distribution,
so read the comments in the file -carefully-, but this should
work for Red Hat and Fedora :)) You will currently be in run-level 5.
You can instead tell the machine to boot as far as run-level 3, 
which means full multi-user stuff, but don't start X up on boot. 
You do this by editing /etc/inittab. 

You need to be root to do this, and then you need to reboot the
machine (this is where other users may get upset if you don't 
tell them!)

You will have a line saying this: 

id:5:initdefault:

Change the 5 to a 3 (or to whatever is described as "full multiuser
mode" in the comments above the line). And then reboot and log in
at the text prompt. 

Once you have finished doing whatever you wanted to test, you
can start X with the command "startx". On Red Hat, the default
desktop is Gnome, so you should get Gnome starting. If you
get something else, go looking amount the commands for something
called something like "switchdesk" and run that to tell it you
want Gnome always (or until the next time you change it :))

Telsa