[NBLUG/talk] Vortex update: Window/Display manager

Dave Sisley dsisley at arczip.com
Mon Sep 8 09:10:03 PDT 2003


[This may be a double-post; something weird happened when I tried to send it 
earlier, and since it hasn't appeared @ nblug talk, I am resending it -dave]

Well.  I'd like to think that I have improved my situation somewhat, but I have
hit another snag.  I've moved on to a better quality of error message. <smile>

I decided to run 'apt-get remove XFree86' (which really runs rpm -e...), and 
took out the older package (i hope).  It also looks like it took out some 
gnome stuff, openOffice, etc.  Oh well.  I can put that back in later, right?

As far as I can tell, though, gnome is still intact.  I tried to apt-get 
install it and was given some package names, which I tried to install 
individually.  apt-get indicated that the latest versions of those were 
already installed.

Now for the real problem:  When I boot into the machine, it defaults into twm, 
not gnome, like it used to.  I don't get the nice gdm graphic login screen,
I get the (imho) ugly XFree86 screen.  When I enter a username/passwd, I am 
dropped into twm.  Frankly, I don't like it.

I think that my problem might be that on booting, xdm is running and not gdm? 

I have been googling and trying a number of fixes.  The incomplete list of 
fixes includes looking at/messing with the following:

/etc/X11/xinit
the prefdm file
user level .Xclients & .xinitrc files
switchdesk
creating symlinks to gdm so that it can be found in the same places as xdm

Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks, dave.




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