The Karmic build has mangled the init.d scripts. You should be able to stop gdm from running by modifying /etc/init/gdm.conf and adding 'runlevel [3] and' and changing the stop runlevel from 016 to 0216 like so:
description "GNOME Display Manager"
author "William Jon McCann <[email protected]>"
start on (runlevel [3]
and filesystem
and started hal
and tty-device-added KERNEL=tty7
and (graphics-device-added or stopped udevtrigger))
stop on runlevel [0216]
Advice taken from this thread.
Another option to boot without gdm is to create a new entry in grub. This has the advantage of letting you boot into gdm again later if you want to. Try copying the first entry from /boot/grub/grub.cfg and putting it into /etc/grub.d/40_custom. Then add the magic word: ' text' to the end of the linux line. Mine looks like this:
menuentry "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-14-generic (console)" {
recordfail=1
if [ -n ${have_grubenv} ]; then save_env recordfail; fi
set quiet=1
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,2)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set f5a3b213-32f8-42b1-b402-62a5e2980897
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=f5a3b213-32f8-42b1-b402-62a5e2980897 ro quiet splash text
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
}
Then run:
sudo update-grub
You can hold down the shift key while booting to select your new menu option.
gdm
still in/etc/init.d/
?