I install RHEL on all my production machines and CentOS on all my test/development boxes. Installing the GUI is helpful for configuration, but you sure don’t want to run them that way all the time. So after everything is installed, configured and tested, I make the following change:

nano /etc/inittab

Change

id:5:initdefault:

To

id:3:initdefault:

Save the file and reboot the machine. When you want to launch a GUI, just run:

startx