Starting and stopping X11 and LXDE from command line

Solution 1:

1) If you launch X by itself, you'll likely find yourself sitting there with a blank grey screen with an X for the mouse cursor. The X window system provides the ability to put graphics onto the screen, but you need other components to actually put the things onto the screen. Starting LXDM starts X as it is a dependency for LXDM to actually run, so there is no real reason to start X first and then use /etc/init.d/lxdm start.

2) Yes it would. You're starting the Desktop Manager which then starts the desktop environment to provide you with a GUI.

3) Yes it does. The Desktop Manager (LXDM) is what provides X in the form of the LXDE (Desktop Environment)

4) I use /etc/init.d/lxdm stop. Generally using the init.d scripts are the safest way to stop services to ensure that no stale files are left behind. With X though, I don't think there is any harm is just doing a killall -9 lxdm