kdm problems
 

Kdm works pretty well for me, except for a few things:

1.When I click on the Menu>Console Login button, kdm just turns itself off, leaving me with nothing but the "Starting up X11 login manager" line and the stuff before it. I have to switch to tty6 to restart it or switch to a different runlevel. How can I get the button working.

2. When I switch consoles and switch back, it does the same the same thing.

BTW, why are there only tty1 and tty6 in runlevel 4?

Is run level 4 the normal run level for X11 in slackware?

Neither in RedHat, SuSE, or Debian, is run level 4 used.
RedHat and Suse run X11 in run level 5 and for Debian it is run level 3.

As to what is happening with your virtual terminals, have a look at your /etc/inittab file.

For RedHat I have

1:234:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --long-hostname tty6

The first digit 1 - 6 refers to the virtual terminal
the following numbers refer to the run level

So if you want a login to appear on every virtual terminal in run level
make sure you specify 4 in the second field as show above.

Your getty specification will no doubt be different from above,
do not change it!

And keep a copy of this file before you edit it.

cp -p /etc/inittab /etc/inittab.SAV

If you mess up this file, you will not be able to login at all to your system.

As for your KDE menu problem, I cannot really help except to say that I think what you are doing is clicking on a button to go to the first available virtual console on which to to a login.

After clicking on that button, can you do an

CTRL-ALT-F7 to get to your X session, or has that terminated?

The runlevel for X in Slackware is 4.
When I click the button in kdm for console login, in doesn't try to switch to a different virtual console. It just disappears.
When I switch from, for example, tty1 to tty6 then back to tty1, I find that kdm has disappeared. It's still running, but I can't get to it.

If you look at your /etc/inittab you should have an entry something like this

x:4:respawn:/bin/nice -10 /etc/X11/X vt07 -dpi 100

Note the vt07?

If the vt07 is not there, do not worry, since that is the default.

That means that X is run on Virtual Console Terminal 7.

1) So when you click on console login on kdm, that takes you to a virtual console on vt01 presumably? When you login there and do

ps -adef | egrep kdm

do you still see kdm running

and if you do

ps -adef | egrep X

do you still see X running?

2) If you type <ALT><CTL><F7> do you then get returned to the kdm graphical login screen?

3) If there is nothing there, and you go

<ALT><CTL><F1>

back to vt01 and then type init 4, does anything happen?

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.

There is no "x:4:respawn:/bin/nice -10 /etc/X11/X vt07 -dpi 100
" line in my inittab.

I edited my inittab to add tty5 in runlevel 4, and suddenly things started to work properly (almost). When I click the Console Login button, I'm switched over to runlevel 3. However, in a few seconds kdm starts again.

Although you are at the command line prompt on a virtual console,
I do not think you are in runlevel 3, but still in runlevel 4.

This is what you want, is it not?

So is everything working now as you want it to work?

My inittab says that I only have tty5 and tty6 in runlevel four. When I click on Console Login, other consoles like tty4 and tty2 also become available, so I was probably switched to runlevel 3. Is kdm supposed to come again in a few seconds?

If kdm is started as a daemon, then yes it will keep returning.

If it did not, then every time you ended your X session, somebody would have to login as root and start kdm again.