Why doesn’t running “sudo shutdown now” shut down?

Traditionally, the command sudo shutdown now will take you to the runlevel 1 (recovery mode); this will happen for both Upstart and SysV init. To get what you want, i.e., to shut down the computer properly, you need to give the -h switch to shutdown. One thing to note...

How to start Ubuntu in Console mode

As described here (ubuntuhandbook.org – Boot into text console ubuntu) you need to edit /etc/default/grub to have the next boot end up in text mode. In summary you will set these parameters: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”text” GRUB_TERMINAL=console...

Boot Ubuntu 16.04 into command line / do not start GUI

You could disable the display manager service with systemctl for example if your display manager is lightdm the run sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service. This will prevent the service from starting at boot. I forgot to mention how to start the GUI, Its as simple as...

5 Steps Start Ubuntu 16.04, 17.04 in Text Mode

The advantages of text modes as compared to graphics modes include lower memory consumption and faster screen manipulation. Text mode or console mode or command line mode saves a lot of RAM uses so most of the time it is very beneficial to boot desktop in text mode....