Ok, this might sound ridiculous, but of all the issues I could have, I'm scratching my head over booting into text mode. Normally I'm in the opposite direction, such as `startx` not working.

To put the wtf-level of this into perspective, I just managed to run Photoshop CS5 without problems (I'm trying to go into text mode to install nVidia graphics drivers).

Speaking of levels, the runlevels concept is confusing me; Debian seems to have a default runlevel of 2 - in the [readme](ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/96.43.20/README/README.txt) for the drivers it says such a runlevel would be text mode, and not even have networking (and that the "default" would be 5).

Just to clear that up, on this Debian, `/etc/inittab` says:

```
# The default runlevel.
id:2:initdefault:

```

Then, I think about booting into "recovery mode", which is text-only. I have a gut feeling that's not the way to do it, as I'm not trying to "recover" anything, and I don't even know what changes in that mode.

So I google, and [a post](http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/460) says I should edit `/boot/grub/grub.cfg`. But that file says at the beginning:

```
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE
#
# It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates
# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub

```

And I really don't feel comfortable editing a file that says that.

Then I find [this other post](http://www.debianadmin.com/howto-boot-debian-in-text-mode-instead-of-graphical-mode-gui.html), Debian-specific. Basically it says to go root and disable the login manager: 

```
# update-rc.d -f gdm remove

```

I was just going to try that out, but some commenters disagreed, some saying I should move a file:

```
# mv /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm /etc/rc2.d/K70gdm

```

Other put this in his `.bash_profile`:

```
if [ "$(echo $(who am i)|awk '{print $2}')" = "tty1" ]; then startx;logout;fi

```

(don't ask me what that means) Somebody even mentions this as a solution:

```
# apt-get remove gdm

```

                                     ![Why?](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5sltC.png)

Could anybody tell me a sane, *simple* way of booting into text-mode on this Debian-based distro?