How can I disable the X-server on Fedora 17?

Question

I want to use a Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" system as a network-shared desktop for cooperative work. For this I'm using TigerVNC which brings its own X-Server and starts a completely separate desktop session in it, which then is exposed via VNC.

As I don't need the regular X-server I would like to completely disable it to free some resources and to enable the VNC desktop to a $DISPLAY of 0 . I have no experience using systemd and Fedora's service structure and therefore have no idea how to securely disable the service.

I tried disabling prefdm.service which seems to be the peak of the iceberg, but I'm not allowed to do that because it's a static service, whatever that may actually mean.

Answer 1

systemd has something called 'targets' which can be thought of as the runlevels of init. prefdm.service will be run with the "default.target" which is set by default to "graphical.target".

So, by setting the default target to "multi-user.target" (aka. SystemV runlevel 3) you will start all but the X11-server. Your vncserver@:[0-9].service will be unaffected by that.

To do so, simply type:

 sudo ln -fs /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target