weirdness going from runlevel 5 to 3

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday crashcourse ca>]

  for debugging purposes (hi, francois!), i wanted to drop out of my
GNOME desktop to the command line in runlevel 3.  the first time i
tried that ("init 3"), the whole display went dark and i couldn't find
anything on any virtual console.  eventually, i powered down and up
again just to get my system back.

  i just tried "init 3" again from the desktop and my GNOME session is
still chugging along happily even though:

# runlevel
5 3
#

  i'm confused.

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Linked In:                             http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
========================================================================