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trying out some of the things in goldilocks' answer

trying out some of the things in goldilocks' answer

trying out some of the things in goldilocks' answer

$ sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop
$ echo "#!/bin/bash" > ~/.xinitrc
$ echo "exec firefox" >> ~/.xinitrc
$ xinit

this does exactly what i want :)

obviously I will need to run X11 to load GUI programs - that's fine, but I'm looking to boot up into text mode and then just execute GUI programs as needed.

obviously I will need to run X11 to load GUI programs - that's fine, but I'm looking to boot up into text mode and then just execute GUI programs as needed.

doing some tests on an ubuntu 12.04 virtualbox vm (hopefully not too different to debian 7?)...

$ ps aux | grep gdm
# *blank*
$ ps aux | grep kdm
# *blank*
$ ps aux | grep lightdm
root      1225  0.0  0.0 270664  3500 ?        Ssl  12:43   0:00 lightdm
root      1234  1.9  2.2 236564 112276 tty7    Ss+  12:43   0:01 /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none
root      1382  0.0  0.0 156772  3572 ?        Sl   12:43   0:00 lightdm --session-child 12 19
$ sudo update-rc.d lightdm disable
update-rc.d: warning: /etc/init.d/lightdm missing LSB information
update-rc.d: see <http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts>
 Disabling system startup links for /etc/init.d/lightdm ...
 Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/lightdm ...
   /etc/rc0.d/K20lightdm
   /etc/rc1.d/K20lightdm
   /etc/rc2.d/K80lightdm
   /etc/rc3.d/K80lightdm
   /etc/rc4.d/K80lightdm
   /etc/rc5.d/K80lightdm
   /etc/rc6.d/K20lightdm
 Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/lightdm ...
   /etc/rc0.d/K20lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc1.d/K20lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc6.d/K20lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc2.d/K80lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc3.d/K80lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc4.d/K80lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
   /etc/rc5.d/K80lightdm -> ../init.d/lightdm
$ sudo shutdown -r 0

and the gui is back up and running again after the reboot! so this clearly did not have the desird effect. however:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop

kills the gui. moving to tty2 (by pressing ctrl+alt+f2) and attempting to open firefox:

$ firefox &
Error: no display specified

so attempting to specify a display:

$ export DISPLAY='0.0'
$ firefox &
Error: cannot open display: 0.0

and now i'm stuck. i can still get the gui back on ctrl+alt+f7 by entering the following into tty2:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm start

but this is not what i want. i just want to be able to run firefox without showing all the other desktop things such as the clock and the menu bars, etc.