[wellylug] Window Managers from startx

[David Antliff]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Nick Jensen wrote:
> OK, that sounds good. But will it still try to start KDE in the background?

It's been a while since i've used Debian on a *desktop* but I believe the
best way to stop KDM starting is to either uninstall it, or remove the
symlink from /etc/rc3.d/ - it's probably called S99kdm or something. That
just leaves you with a normal console login, from which you can manually
run 'startx'. However this won't work 'per-user' as it's a system setting.

I found Gnome's GDM quite useful once, since it can start a Gnome or KDE
session on a per-user basis, and it's fairly easy to create your own
'Session' files for other things like E, Fluxbox, twm, etc.

Also, some distro's use the runlevel to decide whether to start the
display manager - for example, you can create a runlevel in Gentoo called
'gui' and choose to boot it (or not) from a GRUB menu. This runlevel has a
symlink to /etc/init.d/*dm which the non-'gui' runlevels do not. Debian
runlevels are pretty underutilised last time I checked (everything under 2
IIRC) but there's nothing to stop you setting them up as you prefer.

You can also call 'startx' from a shell login script if you want X to
start for specific users.

-- 
David.