[NOOB] Can you help me strip down MATE?

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello I just got MATE running a few days ago on a RasPi2.
So far I really like its performance and interface, but I feel out of my comfort zone when it comes to customizing it.

My goal is to run this as a dedicated server by booting straight into CLI mode and accessing it through SSH (to minimize cpu/memory footprint) - with the optional ability to open the window manager and running it as a regular desktop/media center.

Any tips and tricks would be welcomed, and I would appreciate if some of you would be so kind to answer some of these questions that I have at the moment:

  1. I don’t want to boot into the window manager, does this distro use grub and where is it located so I can set it to boot into ‘text’?
    I can’t find it in /etc/default,

  2. I know of the Ctrl+Alt+F1 command but is it true CLI mode? And how do I go about terminating and starting the window environment in general?

  3. Do you know other processes that I could deactivate to optimize performance?

  4. How hard is the minimalist version of Ubuntu (~40MB) to setup compared to ArchLinux in general? I might just give that a shot :wink:

Any help would be appreciated! :smiley:

2

To edit the grub file you need to type the following command:

sudo pluma /etc/default/grub

3

I can find no such directory!

here’s a screenshot of what I can find related to grub:
http://i.imgur.com/tpD10DV.png?

4

@Flaren GRUB is not present on the Raspberry Pi 2, which is why you couldn't find it :wink:

You can boot to the terminal with the following commands -

Replace disable with enable if you wish to boot to desktop again.

You may overclock the Raspberry Pi 2 to increase performance.

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