turn off gui?

First, go to Accounts in system preferences and change the login options to display the name and password at the login screen.

Once that is done you can then type in >console in the username field to bring up a login at the command prompt, thus bypassing the gui. Have fun!

I'm sorry but for some reason this particular topic is stuck in my head. Assuming you have the remote login service enabled in the Sharing pref pane, are you even required to have any user logged in before you can connect from a remote host using ssh? If not, what is the harm in having the graphical user login screen running? I understand that you may be using up a small amount of system resources to present the logon screen. Other than that, wouldn't that fulfill your need of having a machine that you can simply remote into a command shell when needed?

It wouldn't be a UNIX system, if you can't bring it up without a GUI! So, of course it can be done. I've done that sort of thing many times on Solaris, Linux, etc., but don't have the darwin chops to detail it here from memory. 😟

However, the basics are the same. The system follows scripts and other lists to direct its startup behavior. All that is needed is to find where the launching of the window server and graphical login server is launched, and turn it off. As long as the telnet or rlogin or ssh server is running, you can still come in over the network.

Most of the systems I'm used to, will simply post a character-based login onto the display device, treating the "console" device as a terminal itself.

If you have already solved this problem, please post your response here, and mark this item as "answered". If I get some time, I'll try to figure it out myself, as well.

Have fun,
Rick

It has been a tradition since the Mac-II that a Mac with no display attached does not create the screen buffer or draw the screen.

I have encountered this from the other end, as administrators who want "headless" operation, but occasionally want to login remotely with a screen-sharing program MUST put an adapter on the display connector, else there is no display buffer to share.

It has been a tradition since the Mac-II that a Mac
with no display attached does not create the screen
buffer or draw the screen.

I have encountered this from the other end, as
administrators who want "headless" operation, but
occasionally want to login remotely with a
screen-sharing program MUST put an adapter on the
display connector, else there is no display buffer to
share.

Actually, on my small server (an old 400MHz G4 with no video card running OS X 10.4.9 Client), I have a VNC server app running. Even though it has no display or even a video card, I can still use a VNC viewer app to connect to it and be presented with a full 1024x768 GUI. I have absolutely no idea how or why it works, but it does.

MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.9) White 2.16GHz, 2 gigs RAM, OS X 10.4.9 / Ubuntu 7.04

MultiFinder17-

The old thinking was that if you really did not want a display, why should you have to pay the CPU power to write to it. Since there was a space in the display definition codes for "no display", they used that to tell whether you wanted the display to be "alive" or not.

Based on what you are saying, perhaps it was the XServe that changed people's thinking around completely. That and about 200 times more processing power available than when the original decision was made.

It varies. Some machines needed a video terminator but most modern Macs seem happy in headless mode with no display connection. My PowerMac G4 spends most of its life as a headless server and the only difference is that it tends to revert to a very low screen resolution.

I still have a couple of those terminators sitting in my desk I reckon.

If you haven't already asked there, you may want to post in the Unix Forum.

Someone there may be able to tell you how to do it.

As far as I am aware of, no.

Not that I am aware of but that doesn't say much. 🙂 Perhaps it's something that can be edited in one of the .conf files in the /etc folder? I'm not much of a Unix person.

Try this-

http://mactechnotes.blogspot.com/2006/03/getting-console-to-work-in-104.html

Have fun!

You can also use "sudo nvram boot-args='-s'" on the command line to tell it put the system into single-user mode when it boots. See the man page for nvram for more details.

HAL 9000