How to Enable Text console in Ubuntu

There are three ways to access the
command line interface in Ubuntu, as on
any Linux and UNIX distribution. One is
launching the terminal emulator program
within the graphical user interface. The
other two are about accessing the console
directly, independent of the graphical user
interface and the windowing system
powering it (typically X server), and that's
what we're concerned with here.
The quickest way to get to the console in
Ubuntu is to just press

Ctrl-Alt-F1 . You

will immediately be thrown out of the GUI
and into the clean Linux console where
you can log in and use the command line.
Multiple console terminals are available
this way if you press

Ctrl-Alt-F2, Ctrl-Alt-F3, and so on.
However, what you might want is to get
into the text console when you boot into
Ubuntu instead of booting directly into the
graphics mode. For that you'll need to
make some configuration changes to your
GRUB bootloader.

The configuration file
you will need to modify is

/etc/default/

grub , and it is a good idea to make a
backup of it first in case you ever want to
come back to the original configuration:

sudo cp /etc/ default /grub /etc/default / grub .backup

With that out of the way you can start
modifying the configuration file by
opening it, with superuser privileges, in a
text editor such as nano:

sudo nano / etc/default / grub

Enter your password and the file will
open. Then look for this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet
splash" . Using nano you can search for
this line by pressing the Ctrl-W shortcut
and typing that line in. You just need to
comment it out by putting a hash character
in front of it so it looks like this:

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet
splash"

As you might guess this disables booting
with the splash screen, and the "quiet"
mode, meaning it wouldn't hide the
console output during boot.
Next enable the text mode finding
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and adding the
"text" option to it. The line will then look
like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX = "text"
This will ensure that you see the text
output, but still doesn't enable the console
login. For that find the #GRUB_TERMINAL
line, which is likely commented out,
uncomment it by removing the #
character, and add the "console" option to
it so it reads like this:
GRUB_TERMINAL = console
Finally save the file, which in nano you
can do by pressing Ctrl-X and then enter,
and make sure to update GRUB with the
new configuration using the update-grub
command:
sudo update - grub
Now you can reboot and Ubuntu should
boot in the text mode, and allow you to log
in to the console and run the desired
commands.