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Booting Systemd Based Linux without Graphical Interface

written on Sunday, February 03, 2019 by

If your graphical user interface (be it Xorg or Wayland based) does not start anymore, systemd will get into a restart loop: It will start the graphical interface, that will crash, rinse and repeat.

To avoid this, back in the times of SysV-Init, you would boot to single user mode by specifying a target runlevel in the bootloader configuration. This does not work anymore under systemd, but there's an easier way: Booting into the multi-user target instead of the graphical target!

Edit your kernel line and add the systemd.unit=multi-user.target parameter, for example:

linux /vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=08dc1e7b-c5a8-4395-ab97-fe5c665943de \
    rw cryptdevice=UUID=2fe76075-e3a8-462d-b8aa-861ed138d492:root \
    root=/dev/mapper/root quiet acpi_osi=linux systemd.unit=multi-user.target

(Without the newlines of course.)

That's it, now you're booted into a non-graphical system that – in contrast to the classical single-user mode – has full network access!

This entry was tagged archlinux, linux and systemd