I have a server that sits at a desk all by itself, not running anything terribly important, and frequently I found myself needing to have a workstation there. Since Ubuntu Server doesn’t come with a GUI I went ahead and installed it via…
apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
However, I didn’t want the GUI to startup everytime the server came up. I only wanted it running if I needed it. I already knew I could do…
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
but I wanted a way to stop it from starting. Of course I already know about the rc.d directories and I could manually go in and delete it from there but here are a couple of tools that apparently work on Ubuntu/Debian based distros.
To remove a service from startup:
update-rc.d -f gdm remove
To add a service to startup:
update-rc.d -f gdm defaults
