I’m working on getting my computer to boot to a text console at startup instead of GUI. I had done this with previous versions of OS X, but never got around to it since installing Tiger. I really just want to figure out how to do it, but I could save some memory and a little bit of CPU time, and add to the coolity of startup by getting this to work.
In /etc/ttys, near the top, there are two lines that say console followed by some stuff. I commented out the second and uncommented the first. I have the verbose flag set as well (sudo nvram boot-args=”-v”), twice actually, but this doesn’t work once I change the line in ttys. I get the starting mac os x progress bar, which goes on forever instead. If I hit command-V to boot to verbose at startup, I can get to console. I read someone say that the progress bar screen is simply covering up the console, so I will look into disabling it. I don’t want to have to hold down command-V every time I restart, with penalty of having to hard-restart again if I forget.
For some reason, logging into >console doesn’t work in Tiger. I simply get an error message, then have 30 seconds or so to sit and wait till the login window reappears.
I should update this once I figure more out.
[Update:]I renamed /usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow. Now boot goes through verbose startup direct to a console login prompt, which often has some additional startup messages after it. Thus startup is fine now. I got a startaqua script gathered from macosxhints.com that allows me to start up the regular mac interface. See http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030716220410216 for the script and other instructions/discussions relating to this modification. The script must be run by root.