[SLUG] Preventing X from starting automatically...

[Brendan Dacre <brendand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gentlepeople,

Genius that I am, I was so sure that I knew this old monitor's refresh 
rate that I just went for it during the installation process.  Now X 
starts automaticatically and, of course, it turned out I was actually a 
dunce and now I can't see anything intelligible on the monitor.

I thought I might be able guess the key strokes to use to get back to a 
text mode console (I have a Red Hat 7.1 KDE laptop) but it must be 
running kdm (I guess) and I specified gdm on this Debian box, because 
the keystrokes I entered didn't work.

So, is there any way to alter the run level at boot time?  This would 
allow me a text login to run xconfig and fix the problem.  I pressed 
ctrl-X and got some sort of LILO menu (i.e. a BOOT: prompt) but it seems 
to only allow me to specify a boot image and no parameters.

Otherwise, what are the gdm keystrokes to return to a text mode console?

Finally, are there keystrokes to (on the fly) change the X resolution to 
some sort of safe VGA mode to allow graceful reconfiguration?

I have done this so many times with many operating systems now, you 
think I would learn....  :-)  (how do you do a rueful smile?)

Brendan