Booting without xorg running mint 17.1 cinnamon

[Thomas Lübking]

Do not mess around with files in /boot!

What you want to do is on the grub screen (where you can pick the OS to start)
a) stop the timer ;-)
b) select the Linux Mint entry
c) "[e]dit" it (this depends a bit on the grub setup, but usually there's either a selectable "button" or you just press "e"
d) append " 1" (nothing else)
e) (b)oot that command.

This should really get you into runlevel 1, ie. a root (text)shell

Runlevel 1 is a boot directly into a rootshell (no GUI, no network - but you can start either by hand), 3 is the CLI login (which will likely not work because this very interesting distro doesn't seem to install a/getty) and 5 is the GUI login.

I'd also say that you should rather seek advise in a Mint forum, since the problem seems to be specific to that distro.

Thomas