How to boot without the X window system?

[Charles Landau]

At 4:06 PM +0100 4/22/04, Gary Stainburn wrote:
>On Thursday 22 Apr 2004 4:05 pm, Charles Landau wrote:
>>  >Elvio Caruana wrote:
>>  >>Charles,
>>  >>
>>  >>When X starts and fails, press CRTL+ALT+F1 to go to console mode.
>>  >>Log in as root, then edit /etc/inittab with your favourite editor.
>>  >>
>>  >>You probably didn't know that you can go to a console by
>>  >>CTL+ALT+F[1-6] .. and that will solve you many problems.
>>  >
>>  >*He said he can't boot.  Thus he can't edit inittab*
>>
>>  Right. I actually did know about CRTL+ALT+F1, but once in console
>>  mode I don't get a login prompt.
>>
>
>In that case, have a look at /etc/inittab. You should see something like
>
>1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
>
>once per vertual console, usually from 1 to 5 - it may be that console 1 is
>missing. This is common to prevent it stamping on bootup messages.  Try doing
>CTRL+ALT+F2 instead.

All consoles are there in /etc/inittab. Console 1 was simply busy 
running X. The answer was to use CTRL+ALT+Backspace to terminate X.

It's good to know about the other consoles, though. Thanks.