Since my Ubuntu DigitalOcean droplet is for non-serious use I find it useful to have X running so I can use graphical tools to manage it, and I’ve installed LXDE.

It works really well. With X2GoServer installed and X2GoClient on my Windows 8.1 laptop, server maintenance is very convenient.

Unfortunately, once I installed LXDE, the Console window available via the DigitalOcean web control panel also showed the X server and the lightdm login prompt.

This couldn’t be used successful. There were two offset cursors and the click points didn’t coincide. Since I mainly use Windows as the client I could kill X running on the console with Ctrl-Alt-F1, but it was annoying me.

What I really wanted was X not to start on the DigitalOcean console and X to only start for the X2GoClient logins.

I eventually got this to work as follows:-

1. /etc/default/grub
edit the lines to this

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”text”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”text”

2. run update-grub

3. run systemctl set-default multi-user.target
this sets a symbolic link

Success!
Now the DigitalOcean console does not run X, and can be used in emergencies to log into the server when might not have my laptop available.
X2Go starts it’s own startlxde session.
No more tty7!

The downside, is that TeamViewer now does not work, as there is no “display” for TeamViewer to connect to. But since there is no phyiscal display, TeamViewer gave such a limited screen  resolution, that it’s probably not much of a problem.
X2Go is great as the screen resolution can be maximised to my laptops’s screen resolution.
Hope this helps you.