how to boot the appliance in console only mode?

Question

I don't own a resource rich machine, running appliance upon a hypervisor and many other apps consume a lot of resources. What I want to do is to boot the appliance in console only mode, and then ssh into it from my host machine, it will help me to save some resources. Can anybody guide please how to disable GUI loading by default and boot into console mode?

Answer 1

After some googling, let me share with you how could I make it happen:

• First of all make sure you backup up the grub configuration file by running the following command, so that you may revert the settings easily later if needed

  sudo cp -n /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.backup

• Open the terminal by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T, and give the following command to edit the grub configurations file

  sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

• Go to the line# 11, there you should see GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet”, comment this line by putting a pound sign (i.e. #) in the beginning of the line, it will disable the purple boot screen which you see at the startup.

• Move to the line#12, you should see the following text GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”", change it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”text", it will make your appliance boot into console/text mode.

• Move to line#20, you should see there: #GRUB_TERMINAL=console, uncomment it by removing the pound sign (i.e. # symbol).

• Lastly, issue the following command so that changes may take effect for the next boot

  sudo update-grub

• now reboot the machine, you will be booted into the console mode, give the username jharvad and password crimson

• after providing the login credentials, you will come to know that you cannot control your mouse, hit Ctrl+Alt if you are using vmware workstation and right Ctrl key in case you are using virtualbox to get the mouse released.

• then ssh from your host machine into the appliance, to know the ip address of the appliance, issue it the command ifconfig

• start the dropbox by issuing the command, dropbox start, I couldn't figure out how to start it automatically on boot, to see a list of dropbox related commands give the command man dropbox.

• To shutdown the appliance issue sudo poweroff, and to reboot sudo reboot.

• If you ever need the default GUI for a single session, give the command sudo startx

• If you ever want to revert to default boot settings permanently i.e. boot into GUI directly every time, issue the following command sudo mv /etc/default/grub.backup /etc/default/grub && sudo update-grub

I created this tutorial by adapting this.