Todd Pearsall

This was written for Fedora, not sure how many other other distros it applies to.

There are three ways to change your runlevel: 

* While the Computer is Running: 
1. Open a Terminal. 
2. Become root. 
3. Type: 

init number 

where number is the runlevel that you want to change to. 

You will then be switched into the new runlevel. 
* While You Are Booting the Computer: 
1. When you first start your computer, the GRUB screen (where you choose your Operating System) appears. Select the Fedora that you want to boot into, but press the a key instead of pressing Enter. 
2. You will see a line somewhat like the following: 

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=on rhgb quiet 

Add the number of your runlevel to the end of that line, and then press Enter. For example, to boot into text-only mode, the line would look like: 

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=on rhgb quiet 3 

You will then boot into the new runlevel this time only. 
* Permanently Set a Default Runlevel: 
1. Open a Terminal. 
2. Become root. 
3. Open the file /etc/inittab in your favorite text editor: 

gedit /etc/inittab 
4. Find the line: 

id:number:initdefault: 

where number is your current default runlevel (probably 5). 
5. Change the number in the middle of the line to the new runlevel that you want your computer to start in by default. For example, if you want to start in text-only mode by default, change it to: 

id:3:initdefault: 

You will then boot into that runlevel every time you start the computer.

I played with 2 options:

TrueCrypt and FreeOTFE

TrueCrypt has a Windows and Linux GUI making it pretty easy to use cross platform.  It also do some pretty cool encryption of the boot drive to secure the whole computer, but I haven’t messed with that yet.

FreeOTFE has cool because it has a WIndows GUI and can automount under linux if you encrypt a whole partition as opposed to a volume (file) stored on a partition.  I really wanted to go with FreeOTFE for the automounting, but ran into a deal breaker issue.  Windows can only mount a single partition from a USB drive, so I couldn’t have a small  partition to run FreeOTFE from (so it was portable to any Windows computer) and have a 2nd large encrypted  partition for the data.

Configuring FreeOTFE and Linux see http://emcken.dk/weblog/archives/164-encrypted-usb-drive-in-ubuntu.html. My notes just in case the above link ever goes away:

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup
sudo modprobe dm-crypt ## If you haven’t rebooted

sudo cryptsetup –verbose –verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb5

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 sdb5

# Based on fat32 or ntfs
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/mapper/sdb5 -n “tpearsall”
sudo mkntfs -f /dev/mapper/sdb5

sudo cryptsetup luksClose sdb5