X and Fluxbox :: su -l



I logged to remote machine hosting DSL using putty, then issued "su -l <newuser>" and after supplying the correct password, I noticed that this will start a new windows manager on the remote machine.

It looks like the user profile was loaded to restart the X Manager on the remote machine ?

In runlevel 5 it's default behavior to start a new X session. Boot into runlevel 2 if you want text mode only
DSL has Debian blood in it.  Debian does not make any distinction between runlevels 2 to 5.

   * 0 - Halt
   * 1 - Single
   * 2 - Full multi-user with display manager (GUI)
   * 3 - Full multi-user with display manager (GUI)
   * 4 - Full multi-user with display manager (GUI)
   * 5 - Full multi-user with display manager (GUI)
   * 6 - Reboot

Anyway, it's just changing to another user using the su command and it should not be restarting the X session on the remote machine.

Quote
DSL has Debian blood in it.  Debian does not make any distinction between runlevels 2 to 5.
DSL is not Debian, though. Debian is a distant ancestor, and DSL does not behave as its great grandfather did.

runlevel 2 = text mode as root
runlevel 3 (recently added) = text mode as dsl

If you want to boot into a desktop but prevent a new one from a remote connection, you'll probably need to modify /home/dsl/.bash_profile to remove startx. This would mean having to type "startx" in order to get a desktop initially. A more complicated alternative would be to check if the login is local or remote, and start x accordingly. I couldn't say how to do that, though.


original here.