Ubuntu: How do you change default runlevels without inittab?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Monday 16 July 2007 06:08:50 pm Jack wrote:

> "modern" debian based distros runlevel 2-5 are
> identical "out of the box". I believe that it
> defaults to runlevel 2. So I'm surprised that you're
> actually in runlevel 5. Are you sure of this?

On a real SysV system, level 5 would be the GUI+networking level, so when one 
sees a fully on-line GUI on Linux, one assumes it's in runlevel 5.  Here's 
the standard table:

#   0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#   1 - Single user mode
#   2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
#   3 - Full multiuser mode
#   4 - unused
#   5 - X11
#   6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)


So when someone talks about switching to runlevel three, they mean shut down 
the GUI completely, but still have full networking.