I’d like to keep XCFE for VERY occasional use, so when I’m not using it I’d like to quit it. Also I don’t want it to start at boot. I’ve found a bunch of ways of uninstalling it but that’s not what I’m after, I just want to make sure it is not running unless I start it.
sudo systemctl disable lightdmYou’ll boot into a text tty login prompt. Log in, and run
startxto start your X session. You don’t need lightdm at all.Or, if you do want to run the session manager, log in and run
sudo systemctl start lightdm. You’ll still be logged into tty1, so you might want to switch back to that and log out if you’re concerned about physical security at your device, but it doesn’t otherwise hurt anything.Use
systemctl:- to turn off lightdm,
sudo systemctl stop lightdm. This will also shut down xfce if it was started with lightdm. - to permamently not start lightdm at boot,
sudo systemctl disable lightdm. - to start xfce whenever you want it just run
start-xfce.
Note: this will mean that you computer will boot directly to tty instead of any graphical display, which I assume is what you wanted.
That’s bang on. Thanks. Feels like I should have worked that out, but I just assumed it would be more fiddly.
- to turn off lightdm,
To stop the lightdm from starting, you should be able to disable it by this command:
sudo systemctl disable lightdm
If XFCE still starts automatically, then check your .bash_profile. If there is a line like:
exec startxfce4
then put a # in front of it. Once that is done, you can start XFCE any time by typing exec startxfce4 at the command line. When in XFCE, if you log out it should put you back to your command prompt.
Thanks. I’ll check my .bash_profile
