DSL Tips and Tricks :: only a shell

is there a way that i can only boot with a shell, as in sometimes i dont want the whole GUI window that goes lower than i need when sometimes all i need is just a shell to run a few commands. how can i do that?

by the way i cant mount my hard drives, any suggestions?

edit /home/dsl/.bash_profile
Remove the "startx" line, and backup that file.
When you need to get into X, type "startx".

Your harddrives should be listed in /etc/fstab if they are detected. They would be /dev/hda# or something similar. In console use the command "mount /dev/hda1" for hda1.

if your text runs off the screen, add the vga=xxx where xxx
is the three numbers of resolution your graphic card supports.

I use a kinda old laptop with 800x600 resolution. I add the
following line to the grub or lilo menu vga=788

if you are using the liveCD version, it's dsl vga=788
at the boot prompt.

You could also maybe try using the boot option
dsl 2 vga=normal
if you're running straight from a liveCD. That will drop you into DSL text-mode only console.
Cheers and beers,
Sarah
::Edit:: And I apologise because I responded to the question before paying attention to which forum I was in.. oops!

original here.