Kill Gnome in Debian

Your Gnome Desktop Manager Session is running in the Xserver. Both are just normal services (daemons) your system is starting at boot.

It seems, that X is a child-Process of the Desktop Manager in Debian/Ubuntu. So you have to stop that one (On Debian this might be gdm, on Ubuntu ligthdm) You can stop gdm for this session by using its init-script, with sudo or as root:

/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop

Or you can remove it from the list of daemons started:

update-rc.d <daemon> disable

See: http://wiki.debian.org/Daemon

If you are not sure which desktop manager is in use, you can either look for the scripts in /etc/init.d/ or you can type

ps -eF | grep dm

to search for all running processes containing "dm" (this might yield much more than just your dm though).

Benjamin Maurer

Posted 2012-10-12T09:09:05.670

Reputation: 313

No, that didn't work. Still running like normal. – CptAJ – 2012-10-12T09:22:00.440

1Ah I see, I just tried it. The thing is, if you stop a service, its "children" will be stopped too. I thought it was X -> gdm/lightdm -> gnome/other.

You have to stop the login manager process. It depends on your Debian version. For Ubuntu and Raspbian its lightdm, but I guess you will see a script called "gdm" in /etc/init.d/. That's the one. /etc/init.d/gdm stop – Benjamin Maurer – 2012-10-12T09:28:11.443

There we go! /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop did the trick. Thanks! – CptAJ – 2012-10-12T09:42:30.910

But it will come back after a restart. For a server, I would deactivate the service with update-rc.d – Benjamin Maurer – 2012-10-12T09:51:09.287

Could you [edit] your answer to include the working commands? – slhck – 2012-10-12T10:29:09.013

1By "killing" you mean disabling for a moment, or removing it entirely? – slhck – 2012-10-12T09:13:24.743

Disabling for a moment. Shutting it down, if you will. – CptAJ – 2012-10-12T09:16:33.650

1which debian release is it? – artistoex – 2012-10-12T09:30:58.710

It's debian 6.0.4 – CptAJ – 2012-10-12T09:40:13.613

Kill Gnome in Debian

Answers