Linux on ancient Dell 386 laptop

 You could just stop X from restarting and then remove whichever X login manager it's using (gdm, xdm, or whatever):Ubuntu: How do you change default runlevels without inittab?Most of the runlevels (2-5) in Ubuntu are the same, I believe. The following link has some suggestions for either changing what happens on a runlevel, or starting up in single-user mode (runlevel 1):  since we have no /etc/inittab Bob  

I know this is asking a dumb question but, did you go into the bios and see if you can make it boot to the cd drive?

Thanks for your response, sesamemucho.  That's what I was looking for.  I'll try out those suggestions when I get a chance tonight. Chad- lol, no, that's not a dumb question.  I never mentioned why or how I lost access to the cd drive on the laptop.  I am indeed going into the bios and changing the start order of the drives.  That's how I got Ubuntu on there in the first place. It's possible that the drive I'm using to burn the disks is burning them in such a way that they aren't being read on the old drive.  Not sure, but they check out on my main computer when placed in a different drive. I basically acquired this laptop and one other (better) one from work for $15. I had to supply hard drives for them and that was all. I'm determined to make this smaller one useful in some way.  It's got a 4gb hdd and 64mb ram (yes, you read that right). 

I was able to get the LFS live cd to work by burning a new copy at 8X instead of allowing to run at maximum (40X +).  Unfortunately I had downloaded the 64 bit image. :P Anyway, one of the suggestions from the site that sesamemucho recommended included removing gdm from the runlevel directory (runlevel 2 is the default for Ubuntu, by the way); that worked. I'm now going to dive into building and installing an LFS linux box using this little old laptop... wish me luck.

Nice man! Good luck. Let us know how it turns out!

Bummer, thanks for letting us know!

I'm always going to local computer shows buying up old 486's and old laptops to put linux on them they are perfect their hardware is simple and basic and is just about always compatible a CDRom, Floppy NIC and your set.