I installed Fedora Core 4 on my Compaq Evo 1.7ghz Celeron. When I installed I installed all 3 interface options (KDE, gnome and Xwindows). I've read that KDE can really slow your system down and gnome is a little better, but the best choice is Xwindows.

When I go to login and I click on session I get the options of (no particular order):

• Default
• KDE
• Gnome
• Fail safe terminal
• Last used

I went and tried installing Xwindows thinking that it might have somehow gotten unchecked. It is listed as installed.

Does anyone have any idea why its not letting me use it when I log in?

Gnome and KDE are X-Windows managers.

X-Windows is the generic windowing term for GUI stuff in Unix/Linux.

Both Gnome and KDE open X-Windows GUIs. That is to say it is not a chocie of Gnome, KDE or X-Windows. It is a choice of Gnome or KDE for desktop/window manager. Both provide X-Windows ON the desktop.

The only way to do X-windows without a GUI desktop would be to export the DISPLAY to a separate system that had its own X-Windows enivornment. (For example I seldom start Gnome or KDE on my Unix/LInux servers because my office workstation has Windows XP on it on which I've loaded Himmingbird Exceed. The X-Windows are therefore appearing within my MS-Windows desktop because I've set the DISPLAY variable to point there.

Gotcha thanks. I just remember when I first started using *nix in 94 some of the Sun machines I used actually had XWindows. Was hoping that it was still simplistic and would help reduce some of the lag on the pc.

Yep - back in the early days X-Windows was an add on for some flavors of *nix (for that matter so was TCP/IP). Since you didn't get a choice of different windows managers/desktops they just called it X-Windows.

Solaris by the way is really just SunOS + X-Windows + TCP/IP much as SCO OpenDesktop was just SCO Unix + X-Windows + TCP/IP. This is why Sun OS versions appear to have gone off. SunOS 4 wasn't Solaris. Solaris 2.6 was actually SunOS 6 with the added stuff. Starting with Solaris 8 they just started designating it as Solaris 8 instead of 2.8 because by then no one was really using just SunOS.