Solaris

Hi,

I have just installed OpenSolaris 10 on a Pentium III laptop. When I boot the machine, I get to the gdm driven login screen and upon login I can see my colorful desktop with different icons (like firefox and package manager).
My machine is low on resources and it was running too slow - so I decided to switch to the non graphical mode (I wanted to dump the GUI in favor of CLI)
I ran
#svcadm -v disable gdm

Is that the right thing to do for my requirement?

Soon after running the foregoing command, my GUI disappeared and I was left with a terminal to run commands. I ran top and could see that the memory use had reduced significnantly
However, when I tried to run firefox from the CLI
#nohup firefox &

the system did not bring up the browser. Is it that I can not view the browser in non GUI mode?

GDM is the desktop manager it gives each UI application its frame and the icons at the top right hand corner of each window. befaore the GDM is started an Xserver has to be started (e.g. XSun ), without at least an Xserver running you will not be able to run any graphical applications and without a desktop manager they will all run in the top left hand corner of the screen on top of each tither not be movable, resizable, minizable, or maximizable.

Therae are alternative window managers, .e.g. mwm (Motif Window Manager) which may or may not be installed, take a look in /usr/openwin/bin for binaries ending in wm, some will use less memory that others. CDE is the default for Solaris 8 and may be another alternative you may wish to try.

Thank you,

Your reply makes total sense. And thanks also for the alternatives for desktop management.