Add support to disable GDM/X configuration and startup.

Bug #65818 reported by Jerome Haltom
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
casper (Baltix)
New
Undecided
Unassigned
casper (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Colin Watson

Bug Description

It would be most wonderful if an equivelent to casper-udeb/runlevel was introduced that allowed one to disable X and GDM/KDM from the LiveCD.

The runlevel option seems to have been removed. Likely because runlevels are meaningless with upstart. Even so, there doesn't seem to be any built in way to boot the LiveCD to a text console only.

Specifically, I have a server which I need to boot up with a removable media. My first thought was to use the LiveCD, but mearly starting X on this server causes it to hard lock, making it unable to return to the console.

As a temporary suggestion, I suggest a simple casper-udeb/textmode=true template which simply removes gdm/kdm rc scripts. Nothing more is required now.

When upstart starts handling service startup, maybe we could introduce support for micromanaging service state generically: casper-udeb/disable-jobs=gdm,kdm

Revision history for this message
Jerome Haltom (wasabi) wrote :

I am marking this as something other than a wishlist, because I do believe the change is very simple, and it is of immense benefit before Edgy.

Changed in casper:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
importance: Wishlist → Low
Revision history for this message
Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas) wrote : It would be nice to have an ability to start another X-session by specifying some startup parameter.

It would be nice to have an ability to start another X-session by specifying some startup parameter.
For example on system with less than 256 MB RAM Ubuntu still can be installed from Live-CD by choosing XtermFailsafeSession (look at gdm.conf about this session description).
At least it would be nice to have an ability to run only X-Window system and Ubiquity installer, without starting whole GNOME with memory-hungry nautilus, gnome-panel, gnome-cups-icon, etc...

Colin Watson (cjwatson)
Changed in casper:
assignee: nobody → kamion
status: New → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

casper (1.107) gutsy; urgency=low

  * Fix gconf keys for suspend and hibernate (thanks, Oliver Grawert;
    LP: #144790).
  * Enable suspend again since as far as I can see we no longer need to
    probe DMI while figuring out whether to enable it (see #61535).
  * Add a 'textonly' boot option to disable X (LP: #65818).
  * Write the please-remove-CD message to /dev/console so that it works even
    if usplash isn't running, and make sure to set /dev/console into a sane
    state so that pressing Enter doesn't just result in ^M being displayed.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:12:57 +0100

Changed in casper:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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