If you use Linux long enough you are going to come face to face with a situation where you are in a GUI-less log in and you’re either going to know what to do or you are not. If you don’t know what to do, you will find yourself in a bit of a bind. You might find yourself face-to-face with a GUI-less server or have to reboot a machine remotely. With not GUI – how will you manage?

Simple. You use the commands that have been around since the early days of Linux: shutdown, reboot, and startx. In this article I will introduce you to these commands so you will have a solid understanding of how they are used. And hopefully the shutdown and reboot commands will rarely (if ever) be used.

Let’s begin with the startx command.