Spiral Hosting

GDM Greeter is a graphical and themeable login screen for Linux computers. It isn’t required on a server since you only need command-line access and we recommend disabling it incase it uses excessive resources.

If you use the CSF firewall (recommended) then you may receive warning emails notifying you that GDM Greeter is using excessive resources on your server. You should follow these instructions to change the system run-level and therefore disable the gdmgreeter process.

Instructions

1) You need to run shell commands, so first login to your server using Putty or another SSH client.

2) Open the /etc/inittab file with a text editor such as nano or vi. We’ll use nano in this tutorial, but you can choose vi if you are familiar with it. Run the command:

nano /etc/inittab

3) The first line in this file (after the commented lines) says id:5:initdefault: . Level 5 is the default run-level for a graphical user interface.

4) Change the 5 value to 3 so that the text on this line says id:3:initdefault: . Level 3 is the run-level for multi-user mode (no graphical user interface).

5) Save the file and exit. In nano text editor type ctrl + o to save a file then ctrl + x to exit.

6) You must reboot the server for the new INIT process configuration to take effect; simply type the command:

reboot

7) Wait a few minutes for your server to restart. Job done.

Article last updated: 20 May 2010

Tags: CSF, gdm, gdmgreeter

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Dedicated Servers, Servers, Virtual Private Servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.