mangrumsNet

I have been messing around with virtualization on Kubuntu Karmic and ran into a problem where, after installing 9.10 Server base, I needed to have X for guest OS's but did not want it to autostart.  Removing the scripts from /etc/rc#.d did not work whether I used a utility like sysv-rc-conf or changed in manually.  Here is the trick, and it applies to the final release of Koala and later.

In earlier versions of Kubuntu, you made this change by removing the kdm startup link in the appropriate /etc/rc#.d runlevel. However, in karmic final that no longer works because of the switch to upstart. kdm has to be disabled in /etc/init.

First, rename kdm.conf:

sudo mv -f /etc/init/kdm.conf /etc/init/kdm.conf-disabled

Once that change has been made, to get back to a desktop after booting to CLI:

sudo kdm && exit

Originally I had used startx at the prompt which appeared to work at first, but then I realized certain things weren't functioning the same way as before.  For example, kmixer wouldn't run and I had no sound.  Using the command above seems to be better.