If I want to disable my GUIs completely to save battery life, how would I proceed?
You can just disable your Display Manager (be it kde, lightdm, gdm, etc.) to run at boot, just run depending of your system:
sudo update-rc.d gdm remove
sudo update-rc.d kdm remove
sudo update-rc.d lightdm remove
With this you don't have to stop the desktop manager after booting. But if you don't want this, sudo /etc/init.d/<display_manager_name> stop
will close the desktop manager after booting:
sudo service gdm stop
sudo service kdm stop
sudo service lightdm stop
This will work in any system that uses upstart
, like Debian and derivatives.
In case your system uses systemd
, you can use systemctl
:
## All the next lines are executed as root
systemctl disable gdm ## or gdm3
systemctl disable kdm
systemctl disable lightdm
systemctl disable <name_of_the_service>
tell me battery life from the command line
For seeing your battery status you could either, install and run screen
/byobu
(which is a screen manager, and will show the percentage of the battery + other statistics) or running acpi -b
.
close desktop environments
Check my previous response.
I know that I can hit Ctrl + Alt + F3 and be on the command line, but the desktop manager would be in the background still (I suppose).
Ctrl + Alt + F1-6 just switch you to one of the tty. All the programs you are running will continue executing on background.