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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.