uefi/elilo change to boot into terminal mode rather than X

[John Forkosh]

I installed slackware onto a uefi disk (with a preinstalled windows)
after booting from a slacklive usb stick and clicking that "Install on hdd"
button on the upper-left-hand side of the screen. Works fine, but immediately
starts X when now booted from the disk partition. I'd rather boot into
terminal mode and startx manually when I'm ready. How do I change all the
elilo stuff to do that?

My /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf just contains....
chooser=simple
delay=1
timeout=1
#
image=vmlinuz
label=vmlinuz
initrd=initrd.gz
read-only
append="root=/dev/sda7 vga=normal ro"
....which doesn't seem to have anything relevant that I can see.

Also, the /etc/X11/xinit/ has xinitrc->xinitrc.kde
I prefer fvwm2 and changed the symlink accordingly,
but it still automatically boots into kde.
I assume the changed symlink will work once I boot
into terminal mode and startx myself. But if I can't
boot into terminal mode, is there at least some way
to run fvwm2 instead of kde?
--
John Forkosh ( mailto: j...@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )

[Mark Cudworth]

On 11/18/21 5:40 PM, John Forkosh wrote:
> I'd rather boot into terminal mode and startx manually when I'm ready. How do I change all the
> elilo stuff to do that?

This isn't controlled by the boot process like you mention. You want to
change the default runlevel in /etc/inittab from 4 to 3.

[Lew Pitcher]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021 17:49:27 -0500, Mark Cudworth wrote:

> On 11/18/21 5:40 PM, John Forkosh wrote:
>> I'd rather boot into terminal mode and startx manually when I'm ready.
>> How do I change all the elilo stuff to do that?
>
> This isn't controlled by the boot process like you mention.

But, it /can/ be. The "append" statement (both in lilo and elilo)
passes additional parameters to the kernel, including the startup
runlevel. From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt:
The kernel parses parameters from the kernel command line up to "--";
if it doesn't recognize a parameter and it doesn't contain a '.', the
parameter gets passed to init: parameters with '=' go into init's
environment, others are passed as command line arguments to init.
Everything after "--" is passed as an argument to init.

/If/ the elilo "append" statement had read
append="root=/dev/sda7 vga=normal ro 4"
then the kernel would have passed "4" to init, to be used as the
initial runlevel.

> You want to
> change the default runlevel in /etc/inittab from 4 to 3.

Agreed.

--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills, We Trust"

[John Forkosh]

Thanks Mark and Lew. That worked immediately (ditto for starting fvwm2).
Don't know why I kept thinking it was controlled by the boot process.
Probably due to that stuff in lilo.conf (for my usual non-uefi boxes)
about boot screens. But when you mentioned inittab, I finally recalled
that runlevel stuff, though I'd never had to manually mess with it before.

[K Venken]

Didn't you get a login screen when you go to kde? In this I thought
there was a button (at least in 3.5) where you could select the session
to be any of the window managers available, thus also fvwm?

You can also take a look at /etc/rc.d/rc.4 and comment the kde stuff to
get the xdm login screen, which should pick up the correct one.

[John Forkosh]

K Venken <karel....@domain.invalid> wrote:

Thanks for the additional info. Yeah, got the login screen, and I suppose
you're right about the wm button, but I didn't notice it (actually, noticed
a button, but didn't try it to see what it does). If the inittab change
wasn't possible, then I guess this would've been the fallback solution.