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I have done a Debian minimum install, and installed xorg, gdm, and xfce. When I boot up my machine, I get a command prompt login. After I login, I type startx, and it successfully loads xserver and I get to the desktop.
How do I make it automatically start xserver and use a graphical login (GDM which I've already installed)?
If you wanted runlevel 3 to be the default, then you need to edit /etc/inittab.
# The default runlevel.
id:2:initdefault:
You’d change the ‘2′ to a ‘3′. Next time you reboot, your system will start in runlevel 3. There will be no display manager running in runlevel 3, because you turned it off. Therefore, runlevel 3 will become text only, and it will be the default. If that’s what you want to do.
On Debian, runlevels 3 to 5 are configured the same as runlevel 2 unlike in Red Hat and some other distros where runlevel 5 (or 4 in the case of Slack) is configured to start a login manager. You can change the runlevel on Debian to runlevel 5, but thats not going to automatically start a login manager at boot up.
The link you provided has the similar info that I just posted.
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