I am trying to install the NVidia drivers for linux under Fedora (the new Redhat community driven linux http://www.fedoraproject.org) and I can''t figure out for the life of me how to get into a straight console and kill X. What can I do? By the way, fedora is awsome.

From X, you can get to a console by pressing Control, Alt, and F1 (depends on the distro how many terminals are setup, you can normally use F2, F3, et cetera as well). The most primitive way to kill X from there is to login at the terminal, su to root, and then "killall XFree86" or something. However, if you''re using something like gdm (you will be, with a default Red Hat install), it will then respawn X. So, instead, do something like "killall gdm". There are "better" ways to do it, but I''m too lazy to lookup which variety Red Hat uses and that should work fine. Oh, run gdm again after you''re ready to restart X and switch back to it with Alt and one of the higher F-keys (it''s Alt+F7 for me).

You''d probably be better off just setting your default run-level to 3, reboot, reinstall the driver, set your default run-level to 5, and reboot. I''ve never used Fedora/RedHat, at least not extensively, so I don''t know how to switch run-levels.

The official zorx website

Just press ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X.

quote: Original post by od1n
Just press ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X.

If he''s running gdm (Red Hat does by default, as far as I''m aware), that''ll cause gdm to automatically respawn X.

Yah when I press control + alt + backspace it kills x but then it starts again. How do I kill this gdm crap? When I type in killall gdm it says gdm: no processes killed and when I type in gdm at the console it says gdm is already running. Help?

Or, you could just go into a console with ctrl+alt+f1, login and type "init 3" or possibly "telinit 3" That should drop you down to runlevel 3 without X. When you''re done installing the driver, "init 5" or "telinit 5" (assuming of course, runlevel 5 is using X)

Wahoo! I got it thanks to that nifty control + alt + F1 trick. Thanks Dracos and everybody else who helped me out.

You can kill GDM from respawning simply by doing CTRL-ALT-F1, logging in as root, and typing ''killall gdm''.

Are you using the brand new Nvidia drivers? I hear there are problems with the fresh ones.