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Entering Text Mode in Fedora

· 2 min read
Faycal Alami-Hassani
Faycal Alami-Hassani
Website's owner
note

The following blog post is a self-reminder for troubleshooting Linux distros when access to graphical mode is not possible.

I recently messed up the SELinux configuration on a Fedora distro while trying to relabel the filesystem on boot with this command:

fixfiles -B onboot

After running the command and restarting the OS, the relabeling process was failing repeatedly, leading my system to an infinite reboot loop.

Fixing a messed-up SELinux configuration
Picture by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under CC BY 2.0 license

To fix this issue, I had to boot into text-only mode and change the SELinux mode temporarily from Enforced to Disabled.

Here are the steps to boot into text-only mode:

  1. Restart the system to access the GRUB menu.
  2. Select the kernel version that you want to boot into, then press the e key instead of Enter to edit the desired version.
  3. Scroll down until you reach the quiet parameter. Next, add a white space and number three 3 just after the quiet parameter (i.e., quiet 3). Here is a full example:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=on rhgb quiet 3
  1. Press Ctrl+X to start
  2. The system will boot into the new runlevel this time only.
info

A runlevel is a number indicating what "mode" you want the system to boot into. For instance, runlevel 3 is text-only mode, while runlevel 5 refers to graphical mode.