I need to be able to boot into console mode, from where I launch fvwm. It used to be easy to do this, by setting

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text"

in /etc/default/grub, then updating grub. But then, in order to deal with ubuntu's sound problems I follows the instructions in

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/So...otingProcedure

which ran a number of updates. Since doing this, I now an unable to avoid being booted into lightdm's gui screen. I read that this was a bug, and that the bug had been fixed, but my version of lightdm (1.2.1) is apparently the most recent one. I tried to remove lightdm as some threads suggest with

sudo update-rc.d -f lightdm remove

but this simply hung my machine.

so I had to use recovery mode to get back.

Could anybody suggest something please?
How could it possibly be so hard to do such a primitive thing as avoid a gui? Ubuntu seems to want to be more like windows every new release....

Thanks for any advice!