OK..

Im trying to upgrade my Mandrake 9.1 rc2 release with KDE 3.1.1 that I downloaded from Freshmeat.

I viewed the readme, and installed all of the pertinent packages for the install : ie.. aRts, kdelibs, kdebase, kde-i18n, and a few others.

I configured, and installed all of the packages through the command line.

I guess the last step is to configure the .Xsession file, so that it will run the new version of KDE.

I found the file, but when I try and add 'startkde' at the end of the file, it tells me that I dont have enough privledges to make changes to the file.

Ive tried editing the file with Kedit, and it tells me I dont have enough permissions to write to this file??

When I log in as root, through the konsole, I can edit the file....like inserting 'startkde'....but I dont know how to save.

Is there a way I can log in as root through LILO, at the login screen?

How can I get around editing the file?? Or how can I gain the appropriate permissions to change the file?

Any help would be great!!

look at the man page of your editor how to save
if its vim
you press esc then :wq <enter>

If you su - to root maybe? :)

Cheers,
Tink

I suggest that you log in as root and use chown to change the ownership of .Xsession to your user name and group. Then you can edit .Xsession as user.

I was able to edit, and save my changes to the .Xsession file.....
with the line 'startkde' at the end of it.

I do recall the installation instructions saying that I had to delete anything that was originally calling the windows manager.

Im not sure what lines of code to delete.....if any??

It also said, that if there wasn't a .Xsession file.....create one with one line of code that says 'startkde'.

Any ideas??

I think that the instructions are refering to other window managers like Gnome. Delete the commands in .Xsession to start whatever GUI, if any, you were running before you switched to KDE 3.1.1.

I see a lot of code pertaining to the login screen and options......just dont want to delete something Im not supposed to??

I dont know the code that well.

I was thinking of replacing the entire .Xsession file all together...... with a new file that only contains one line :
startkde

They said it would work in the manual. Has anyone tried this yet?

Or am I the guinea pig

Log in as root. Save a copy of your user .Xsession someplace handy. Change .Xsession to something interesting. Then try to log in as user and see what happens. If only bad things happen you can log in as root and try something else.

You graduate to full fledged penguin when you can completely mess up your Linux box and then fix it without doing a reinstall.

The .xsession scripts are created by the distributors. Your Mandrake script is different than my SuSE script. That said, I changed my .xsession script, among other things, when I converted from KDE 2 to KDE 3. Looking at my .xsession script I can describe the logic this way.

At the kdm login I can start failsafe (bash), Gnome 2, or KDE 3. My .xsession script first sets up the parameters to run failsafe, either by choice or because of an error in trying to start Gnome or KDE.

Then the script goes through the logic of determining what I asked to start and if that GUI exists. It sets a variable called $WINDOWMANAGER by SuSE to the full path name of the command to start either KDE or Gnome.

In typical SuSE thoroughness it also sets up SSH, csh, and tcsh even though I do not have them installed.

Finally, the script issues the command: exec $WINDOWMANAGER

If I am starting KDE then the above command translates into:
exec /usr/X11R6/bin/startkde

Assuming that startkde is on the PATH then startkde is the equivalent command.

So I think that your idea of simply issueing the startkde command is probably the best one.