my computer boots automatically to a graphical login and when I type a username other than root it seems to do the whole password thing, screen goes black, a couple of flashes and then I'm back at the login screen. I have Red Hat 7.1 and I installed both GNOME and KDE so I could try them both. The default was apparently GNOME and it boots to the GNOME graphical login, from which I can choose between GNOME and KDE. I recently changed to KDE (using switchdesk) but it still boots to the GNOME login. I have a feeling that it was that switching that messed things up but of course you guys are the experts, not I! I would also perfer to use the KDE login (I used it in a class at skool), so how would I go about getting that to come up instead of the GNOME one? Thanks for your help guys!

I figured out what was stopping me from logging in under a name other than root. Apparently if your home directory is full (i.e. you didn't partition your hard drive wisely because you didn't know what you were doing and only gave 100MB to a separate partition for /home) you cannot log in under anything except root (since /root has its own partition - somewhere around 30GB)

But now that that part is sovled, I'm still wondering how to boot to the KDE graphical login and how the hell do I kill x windows? I tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace but that just makes the screen go blank and flicker like I described for the failed login attempts and just brings me back to the GNOME login. I think there is a script somewhere running at startup that tells it what to do, but I don't know where it would be, how I would find it, or what I would do to it if I found it...so I'm open suggestions along those lines as well.

When your computer boots into the graphical login, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace just restarts x window. You can have the computer boot up into a text login by editing your /etc/inittab file. Look for this line:

id:5:initdefault:

Change the 5 to a 3 and the next time you boot up, it will be a text login. Login and run startx to start x window. Then when you press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, x window will be killed and you'll go back to the console screen that you started it from.

I don't have red hat, but I think there is a line near the end of the /etc/inittab file that starts the graphical login screen. Look to see if you see something like prefdm in one of the lines.

KDE login manager is called KDM so if you can't find the line to change login manager in inittab you can do it this way too.
Edit inittab to go to text mode as suggested before. Then in a startup script (i dont know what they are in RH) but a line "/usr/bin/kdm" (or where ever kdm binary is) at the end, and then Linux will boot into a text mode, get to the line you added and start KDM. You can switch between text mode and graphical mode with Ctrl+Alt+F(1-7)
Hope that helps
-NSKL