# How do I enter the terminal without going into the desktop environment?



## SirDolphinHand (Aug 20, 2015)

Hey guys, I am a newcomer to FreeBSD and Unix in general so sorry if this stuff seems trivial.

After installing FreeBSD I proceeded to install Xorg and KDE on it. I edited the files as written in the handbook and rebooted the PC. 
It got me to the login screen but after that it gave out an error that said

```
Warning: Cannot open ConsoleKit session: Unable to open session: Failed to connect to socket var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
Could not start D-Bus. Can you call qdbus?
```
 and then just goes back to the login screen. 

If I try to go to the terminal from there using ctl-alt-f1 the colors on the screen become distorted and nothing happens, but if I press ctl-alt-f9 it goes back to the normal login screen.

My question is: how can I access the regular terminal before Xorg/KDE boots up?


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## Beastie7 (Aug 20, 2015)

Boot up the FreeBSD DVD and drop into shell. Then comment out the display manager in your rc.conf file so it won't initialize first on boot. After that, you should get a prompt to log in into your shell user account after rebooting again.


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## SirDolphinHand (Aug 20, 2015)

How do I view my files from the disc shell?


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## SirDice (Aug 20, 2015)

Boot to single user mode. Then depending on your filesystem you do the following:

ZFS: 

```
zfs mount -a
zfs set readonly=off zpool
```
(Replace zpool with the name of your pool)

For UFS:

```
fsck -yp
mount -u /
mount -a
```

After that you can edit /etc/rc.conf.


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## SirDolphinHand (Aug 20, 2015)

That one worked, I managed to disable KDE's auto start.

Thanks a lot!


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## tobik@ (Aug 20, 2015)

SirDolphinHand said:


> If I try to go to the terminal from there using ctl-alt-f1 the colors on the screen become distorted and nothing happens, but if I press ctl-alt-f9 it goes back to the normal login screen.


That should work. Try adding kern.vty=vt to /boot/loader.conf to maybe fix this if your are using a KMS video driver (see vt(4)).


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