shut down X - etc..

[blingbling!!]

Hi people!

Another quick one i hope....
i'm about to re-install the drivers for my graphics card, and the instructions say that i should shut down X windows and reset my default run level to boot into the console whilst i'm installing. Question is : HOW!!! I've tried logging out, in the hope that 'Shut down X' would be one of the options on the initial login screen, to no avail. I thought of issuing a 'kill' command from the console (within X-Windows) to anything that looks slightly 'K-ish', but this seems s little harsh. The card is an nVidia geforce 2 64M (and the nVidia site has a very good linux section - respect!)
Is it even necessary to shut down X-Windows? I'm tempted to try without......

Thanks once again for your help

Robin

[Hayl]

i have never shut down X when installing nvidia drivers.

(disclaimer: that is not to say that you won't have problems if you leave it running)

[murks]

CTRL+ALT+Backspace should shut down X and leave you at the command prompt

[swangods]

Two options:

1. Log out of X, back to login screen. Switch to a full console (tty) window (not just terminal). Do this by pressing ctrl+alt+f1 to select tty1, f2 for tty2, etc up to usually 6. Then find and kill any X processes:
ps aux | grep kdm
ps aux | grep gdm
ps aux | grep xdm
ps aux | grep [anything else that may be x-related, but those others should be fine]

Then kill the PID shown for any options that have revealed themselves above.

2. Edit /etc/inittab. Find the line regarding "default" level - it should just list a runlevel and the word default on one line, with something else on there (sorry, wish I could be more specific! but i'm not at home). It'll probably be runlevel 4 or 5.. there should also be a listing for the available runlevels. They are either 0 to 6 or 1 to 6... and the list will probably say "5: with X" or "3: no X" or "6: Reboot", stuff like that. Change the "default" line in inittab to whatever the "no X" level is - usually 3. Then reboot - and it should boot you to a console-only. Do your driver install, then restore the inittab default to whatever it was that was starting X.

[swangods]

Originally posted by murks
CTRL+ALT+Backspace should shut down X and leave you at the command prompt

Strangely, I've found that in Libranet and ... maybe SuSE ... ctrl+alt+backspace just exitted the current session (KDE, etc) and brought me back to the graphical login. *shrug* I just drop down to a tty manually if need be