How do I disable X after boot?

Question

I was reading "How do I disable X at boot time so that the system boots in text mode?" and will be implementing this. I see in the answer that there is a simple way to start the GUI but don't see how I would turn it back off after doing what I needed with out shutting down the computer. So how do I turn off X but keep the system running as normal and not shutting down?

Answer 1

It depends how you start X after disabling it at boot time, I think.

If you invoke a display manager such as lightdm (i.e. sudo service lightdm start) then you will need to stop the service again (sudo service lightdm stop).

On the other hand, if you start a desktop session via xinit (i.e. using the startx command), then simply exiting from the session (using the desktop's Log out... function or a commandline equivalent such as gnome-session-quit) should return you to the CLI prompt.