Disable GUI on BeagleBone Black running Debian

The Debian image for the BeagleBone Black that they have on their website comes with a GUI by default. I'd like to completely disable the GUI, but in the simplest way possible. It is used as a headless device and doesn't need those resources sucked up.

I have successfully disabled it, but I feel my procedure is breaking things behind the scenes. All I am doing is:

apt-get remove lightdm

In retrospect, perhaps apt-get purge would be better.

Can anyone see holes in the method, or recommend a better method?

Thanks.

Atomiklan

Posted 2014-07-10T18:47:26.800

Reputation: 527

Answers

aptget remove lightdm should work fine, if you want to remove it. If you just want to disable it, go to /etc/rc2.d and delete the one with lightdm in its name.

BenjiWiebe

Posted 2014-07-10T18:47:26.800

Reputation: 7 672

Add following to /boot/uboot/uEnv.txt:

## For BBB Debian OS  
## This disables lightdm run from "/etc/init.d/lightdm".
optargs=text

atomic

Posted 2014-07-10T18:47:26.800

Reputation: 41

2For me the location of the file was /boot/uEnv.txt – Ben – 2015-05-05T18:23:35.670

If you only want to disable the gui rather than removing it entirely, then instead of editing any rc.d files manually, the preferred way is to run the following command:

    sudo update-rc.d lightdm disable

shortwavedave

Posted 2014-07-10T18:47:26.800

Reputation: 21

1Can you explain how this is any better than apt-get remove lightdm (which also does not edit any files manually)? Please do not respond in comments; [edit] your answer to make it more complete. – Scott – 2017-02-14T19:15:39.017

@Scott - Disabling is not removing? apt-get remove lightdm removes it entirely, so you'd have to reinstall it entirely if you want to turn it on again. Disabling it just prevents it from starting, letting you turn it back on with just a simple configuration change later. – Fake Name – 2017-02-28T02:48:51.557

@FakeName: Are you asking me something or telling me something?   If you’re asking me something, please clarify.   If you’re telling me something, why you are you using a question mark? – Scott – 2017-03-04T23:46:31.627

You asked how this answer is different from apt-get remove. This answer disables, rather then removes the package, which I would have thought was fairly self explanatory. Since I doubt you're asking about the definitions of "disable" vs "remove, I assume you're actually asking something else. Is that not correct? – Fake Name – 2017-03-05T05:38:22.150

@FakeName: You have over *35,000* total reputation on [SE]; you should know by now how to look at a post’s revision history. If you look at the revision history for this answer, you will see that, at the time I posted my comment, the answer was very terse, not mentioning “disable” or “remove”, and not at all self-explanatory. (I’m still not clear why you used a question mark at the end of a declarative sentence, but no big deal.) – Scott – 2017-03-07T00:09:22.433

I think you should both thumbs up my answer – shortwavedave – 2017-03-07T00:43:44.060

I... uh... didn't think of looking at the history. Derp. – Fake Name – 2017-03-07T03:21:12.483