As with most stories on this site, I use my stories to store notes on
things that I keep needing to lookup and that might help others.

This one is how to change the default startup runlevel of a debian (via
knoppix distribution). In this case I want it to stop booting into
graphical mode, or boot into runlevel 3.

The “/etc/inittab” file tells init which runlevel to start the system at and describes the processes to be run at each runlevel.

So, according to

Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:

# 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)

the entry

id:3:initdefault:

would boot into multiuser mode, without X windows starting which is what I want.