Booting without xorg running mint 17.1 cinnamon

[Thomas Lübking]

On Mittwoch, 7. Oktober 2015 20:35:23 CEST, Eric Gunther wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-10-07 at 09:16 -0600, David wrote:
>> the full name of the driver is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run  
>> i did try the nvidia support and they were not very helpful, they said
>> i had to contact the actual card manufacturer (evga), who said i had
>> to contact nvidia.... i looked through some of the nvidia forums and
>> they didn't have anything that was helpful.
>> it is mate display manager, although it is running in cinnamon. i
>> double checked because there were several others depending on distro
>> (lightdm, kdm) but mine does in fact have mdm by default.
>
> OK
>
>> ill look at virtual terminals for mate, would that have x stopped
>> though?
>
> I don't think it would have stopped X but uses another virtual terminal.
>
>> all of my f keys (2-7) result in a blank screen, f8 will switch back
>> and forth from the blank screen (the others will not switch back).  i
>> don't recall off the top of my head if there was anything with the
>> keys above f8 but nothing that seemed any different or i'm sure i
>> would remember.
>
> OK
>
>> graphics is one of the things that doesn't make sense to me
>> sometimes, so when it comes to things like framebuffer i'm lost.  if i
>> know where to look to find out what it needs to be, and where it needs
>> to be changed to make that happen i can usually handle that.  anything
>> more and i'm at a loss though.
>
> It is complicated. although as I mentioned before...
>
>
> http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/256.35/README/index.html
>
> this might be a place to look.
>
>> i also read that shift, esc, or del can gain access to boot options
>> while on the bios screen but the only thing i was able to get (once,
>> and not since then) was a grub> command line that i don't know how to
>> get around in.
>> 
>
> OK, Try what Thomas has said because he is far more knowledgeable than
> I:

Oh, flowers. How kind and nice =)

If the only point of this exercise is btw. to install the nvidia driver:
I kinda doubt it's really required to enter runlevel 3 or below for this.

Granted, the installer will fail to load the new kernel module while X is up, but unless it dares to restore the installation in turn, a reboot will "fix" that anyway.

inb4 you're currently using nouveau and end up with an unusable system, ensure to blacklist the nouveau kernel module:

echo "blacklist nouveau" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/bl_nouvea.conf

or similar.

Cheers,
Thomas