Changing Centos7 runlevel

17 October 2014

I installed Centos7 as minimal for a basic LAMP server but then I decided to switch to Gnome instead of pure command line environment. If you're interested how I did it, groupinstall has the perfect recipe.

$ yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop" "Graphical Administration Tools"

Runlevel used to be on etc/inittab but if you will look at its content now, it suggests you have to use a different route to change it.

# inittab is no longer used when using systemd.
#
# ADDING CONFIGURATION HERE WILL HAVE NO EFFECT ON YOUR SYSTEM.
#
# Ctrl-Alt-Delete is handled by /etc/systemd/system/ctrl-alt-del.target
#
# systemd uses 'targets' instead of runlevels. By default, there are two main targets:
#
# multi-user.target: analogous to runlevel 3
# graphical.target: analogous to runlevel 5
#
# To set a default target, run:
#
# ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/<target name>.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target
#

Default runlevel can be set either by using the systemctl or making the symbolic link of runlevel targets the default file. I prefer the first method so here it is.

Using systemctl

You have to check the available targets first.

$ sudo systemctl list-units --type=target --all
UNIT                   LOAD   ACTIVE   SUB    DESCRIPTION
basic.target           loaded active   active Basic System
cryptsetup.target      loaded active   active Encrypted Volumes
emergency.target       loaded inactive dead   Emergency Mode
final.target           loaded inactive dead   Final Step
getty.target           loaded active   active Login Prompts
graphical.target       loaded inactive dead   Graphical Interface
local-fs-pre.target    loaded active   active Local File Systems (Pre)
local-fs.target        loaded active   active Local File Systems
multi-user.target      loaded active   active Multi-User System
network-online.target  loaded inactive dead   Network is Online
network.target         loaded active   active Network
nfs.target             loaded active   active Network File System Server
nss-lookup.target      loaded inactive dead   Host and Network Name Lookups
nss-user-lookup.target loaded inactive dead   User and Group Name Lookups
paths.target           loaded active   active Paths
remote-fs-pre.target   loaded inactive dead   Remote File Systems (Pre)
remote-fs.target       loaded active   active Remote File Systems
rescue.target          loaded inactive dead   Rescue Mode
shutdown.target        loaded inactive dead   Shutdown
slices.target          loaded active   active Slices
sockets.target         loaded active   active Sockets
sound.target           loaded active   active Sound Card
swap.target            loaded active   active Swap
sysinit.target         loaded active   active System Initialization
syslog.target          not-found inactive dead   syslog.target
time-sync.target       loaded inactive dead   System Time Synchronized
timers.target          loaded active   active Timers
umount.target          loaded inactive dead   Unmount All Filesystems

Then do the actual change.

$ sudo system set-default graphical.target
# confirm that runlevel 5 is set
$ sudo systemctl get-default
graphical.target