Shutting down X Server
 

How do I shut down an X Server so that I can install Linux NVidia drivers? Thanks...

/etc/inittab
open that up, find the line that has something with some colons and a 5 and stuff, change the 5 to a 3, save, reboot

when you want it back, type startx to start X, and change the # back to a 5 and save

And your certain that works with all linux distrobutions? And that the instructions were clear enough he won't obliterate his install and be left to fend for himself.

It's not nice to tell someone to change a random 5 to a 3 :)

Rather, you should change the standard runlevel at boot to the one that does not automatically bring up X, so that you can do your changes.
This, of course, is done by changing a 5 in /etc/inittab to a 3.

Also, it does not truely work everywhere.
The startup of X could be done via a the (hidden) .profile file in one's home directoy containing the line "startx".
Gentoo Linux has named runlevels "boot", "nonetwork", "default" and "reboot". So you would rather need to remove the command to start X from your current runlevel.

Unrelatedly, your window manager should provide an option to shut down X, or you can just press CTRL-ALT-Backspace. But your system could be configured to log you out/shut down after that :\

I am still a strong believer in runlevel-3 booting.


Sometimes you don't need X, so why boot it and shut it down in those times? It's not very hard to type "startx"

All I did was kill the display manager, like kdm, gdm, xdm etc... then it went into the console :)

I did that , but now I dont know how to reenable the display manager

when your in the console just type the display manager you want to use (eg.. kdm)

I do not have X starting when I boot either.