Saturday, June 21, 2014

[Fedora] Omit GUI and boot with or into command line

Before you start, you need to know what is runlevel.
runlevel is a number that indicates which mode the computer to boot into. For instance, runlevel 5 is graphical mode, where runlevel 3 is text-only mode. Runlevel 1 is single-user mode, commonly used for troubleshooting.
And GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), a bootloader which allow you to choose which OS to boot into during computer start up. Here's a screenshot of GRUB.


Now, there are two options:
  1. boot with command line, means omit the filling up Fedora logo and show the boot progress by command line
  2. boot into command line, means completely omit booting into GUI and end up in command line
What you need to do is at the GRUB screen, select your Fedora OS name and press "e".
Then find rhgb in the line start with linuxefi /vmlinuz. On the right side of rhgb should be word "quiet".

For option 1: Remove the rhgb from the line and press CTRL+X or F10. This should show the command lines as boot progress instead of the Fedora logo. Useful for identifying what has failed during boot progress. The system will still end up in GUI afterwards.
Sample = ... rhgb quiet ... 

For option 2: Here's why you have to understand the runlevel. You achieve this by simply add a runlevel number "3" after the word "quiet" (space in between two words) and press CTRL+X or F10. This should boot the system into CLI instead of GUI.
 Sample = ... rhgb quiet 3 ...

Note:
  • rhgb = RedHat Graphical Boot