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Aero Windwalker
Asked: 2017-11-24 03:06:52 +0800 CST

How to turn off Ubuntu 17.10's GUI (GDM)?

  • 772

Unlike 17.04, sudo service stop gdm or sudo service stop lightdm will return stop: unrecognized service, so my question being how to stop the GUI process in this bleeding edge version?

17.10

3 Answers

  1. Instead of killing the gdm, you can change the systemd target.

    Changing the systemd target

    As mentioned here, starting from 16.04, Ubuntu uses systemd and the boot process relies on a set of targets. Each target defines the system software that Ubuntu must run.

    This is a list of targets for Ubuntu:

       ┌───────────────────┐
   │ Target            │
   ├───────────────────┤
   │ poweroff.target   │ turn off the computer
   ├───────────────────┤
   │ rescue.target     │ minimal for admin/rescue tasks
   ├───────────────────┤
   │ multi-user.target │ multi-user, no GUI
   ├───────────────────┤
   │ graphical.target  │ multi-user, GUI
   ├───────────────────┤
   │ reboot.target     │ reboot the computer
   └───────────────────┘

    To stop the GUI, you can change the target. The system checks all the running system software and kills those not included in the specified target. In consequence, if you change to the multi-user.target target, the GUI will be killed.

    To change the "target" and kill the GUI:

    sudo systemctl isolate multi-user.target

    To make this the default "target" (and start booting your computer without GUI), you can use:

    sudo systemctl enable multi-user.target
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
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  2. To stop:

    sudo telinit 3

    To start:

    sudo telinit 5
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  3. To stop it:

    sudo systemctl gdm stop

    To disable it completely:

    sudo systemctl gdm disable

    To start it:

    sudo systemctl gdm start

    and to re-enable it:

    sudo systemctl gdm enable

    To see the actually running services

    systemctl --state running
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