On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:16:21 -0400
Haines Brown <haines@???> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 01:57:58PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 13:01:14 -0400
> > Haines Brown <haines@???>, "To:dng"@???,
> > "Cc:Bcc:"@??? wrote:
> >
> >
> > > What is this environment (it has a chartreuse background), and
> > > how do I get rid of it? How do I get rid of the gui login (xdm,
> > > gdm, kdm etc not installed) so that I can run the machine from
> > > console without X system?
> >
> > Hi Haines,
> >
> > You can find out what Display Manager you're running by doing this:
> >
> > ps axjf | less
>
> I tries this and was unsure how to identify a display manager. I found
>
> xdg/xfce4/xinitrc
> xfce4-power-manager
> xfce4-session
> xfce4-panel
> thunar
>
> Aptitude tells me that xfce4 and these specific utilities are not
> installed.

I suspect that aptitude is wrong, or you are interpreting it wrong. But
anyway...

Rereading your original post: Do you want to not have a Display Manager
such as lightdm, kdm, gdm etc, or do you want your computer not to have
X at all? If the latter, just deinstall X. If the former, you need to
find your display manager, based on ps axjf.

Here's my ps axjf for a Lubuntu Qemu VM

http://paste.ubuntu.com/12074236

Notice that there's no mention of "xinit" or "startx", so
it's safe to assume that X got run automatically. Looking at
the ps axjf output, you see that the parent of X is lightdm,
which is a known display manager. xdm, gdm, kdm are three other known
display managers.

So, if I wanted my Lubuntu to boot to CLI, I'd theoretically need to do
two things:

1) Check for useable virtual terminals, and get init to make one if
none.

2) Disable lightdm

That used to work, but not in the brave new world. Systemd infested
Lubuntu 15.04 simply spins forever if you rename /usr/sbin/lightdm. Now
I ask you, if you were putting out a distro, is there any mistake for
which you response would be to spin forever with no messages? Me
neither.

I finally got it to boot to CLI by removing lightdm* and plymouth, but
then, after setting .xinitrc, startx produces a blank screen. Well, I
could have gone on and on debugging this thing, but so many
complexities, so little time.

Anyway, luckily for you, you're on Devuan with sysvinit, so I'm pretty
sure almost any way that you could disable plymouth and lightdm would
bring you to CLI, from which you could run startx which would work with
a properly configured ~/.xinitrc.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt
August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust