Switching from GDM to KDM

I have tried the tried teh FedoraNEWS tip at http://fedoranews.org/krishnan/tips/tip037.shtml
without success. And I would really liek to give KDM a try, esp, since I'm slowly banning Gnome.

How do I switch to KDM? What could I be missing?

Thank you.

Hi pembo

It's possible you don't have KDE installed. From the main menu button, select System Settings then add/remove applications, the first item in the list is Desktops. Just below Gnome is KDE if it's not installed you can install it from this point by clicking in it's box.

Thanks dude,

But yes I do have KDE installed. Infact, which kdm returns /usr/bin/kdm. Hence the shock and fustration.

I made it work by editing /etc/X11/prefdm and exchanging the positions of KDM and GDM. Apparently they wrote it so that instead of choosing the user's default (i.e. KDM) it simply used the first on the list. There may be a better way than this meatball surgery, but it worked for me.

Originally posted by pembo13 I have tried the tried teh FedoraNEWS tip at http://fedoranews.org/krishnan/tips/tip037.shtml without success. And I would really liek to give KDM a try, esp, since I'm slowly banning Gnome. How do I switch to KDM? What could I be missing? Thank you.

Change the lines in /etc/sysconfig/desktop to read:

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

This will cause the script /etc/X11/prefdm to load KDM instead of GDM. Cheers!

ciaran_skye, dude, I forgot to come back here and post that you idea worked, altough I had already had that idea, but it worked. Although I had to reboot to notice the change (is rebooting done in Linux?)


growler.....that simple (suppose to work) approache just does work for some reason, I'm not bash scripter, but I'm suspecting that $DISPLAYMANAGER just doesn't get it's varaible for some reason

I've found that after changing /etc/sysconfig/desktop, if I do a [ctrl-alt-bksp] it won't change, but if I change the runlevel to 3 and then bacck to 5 (as in "init 3;init 5") it works perfectly.