Manjaro How to Boot to Terminal

If you are running Manjaro and want to know how to boot to a terminal chances are you want to do one of these three things:

1. Booting to a console as an ordinary user ( no xwindows )
2. Single user mode as root
3. Switch to a purely text based console

We’re going to show you how to do all three of these.

Booting to a console as an ordinary user

If you want to boot into pure text based mode with only a CLI instead of xwindows with a graphical desktop environment you can adjust the boot parameters from the grub menu.

• At grub menu press a key to stop booting
• Use the arrow to select the manjaro entry
• Press ‘e’
• Use the arrow to select the linux line
• Use the right arrow to move past ‘quiet splash’
• Use backspace to remove ‘quiet’ and ‘splash’ keywords
• Type systemd.unit=multi-user.target
• Press F10 to boot

Manjaro Single User Mode as Root

You can change the boot parameters from the grub menu to boot into single user mode.

• Press a key at the grub menu to stop booting automatically
• Use the arrow to select the manjaro entry
• Press ‘e’
• Use the arrow to select the vmlinux line
• Use the right arrow to move to the end of the line
• type ‘single’ without quotes
• press F10

Switch to a Purely Text Based Console

If you are already up and running in a graphical desktop environment with xwindows you can still switch to a pure text based console .

Your system has multiple virtual terminals. You can switch between them with these key combos:

ctrl+Alt+F(1-8)

For example you can switch to a purely text based console on vt3 with this key combo:

ctrl+Alt+F3

The desktop session ( graphical environment ) is generally on vt7. You can switch to that with this combo:

ctrl+Alt+F7