Ludicrously simple X quesiton:

How do I quit X? In order to install some graphics drivers (a whole different problem) I need to not have an X server running, and so far the only way I've found to do this is to turn off 'automatically start a garphical server on boot' and then reboot, which seems a bit perverse. 'kill X' works except that it automatically restarts. Surely it can just be swtiched off temporarily?


Various Gnome questions:

How can I arrange / align my icons? For example, under KDE it's easy to align icons to an invisible grid, but under Gnome the only option seems to be to arrange them all by name, which I do not want. As an added finickity question, how can I get the 'f' in 'floppy' to be capitalised? I tried renaming it as root but it didn't seem to work...

There's more: At the moment, I use kppp to dial up to the Internet. For some reason kppp has taken it upon itself to start automatically upon every login; how do I stop this? Plus, with Gnome the 'dock to taskbar' function doesn't seem to work, instead plonking kppp into a very small separate window. Is there some other dialling program I should know about / use? And is there any way to get a dialling program to automatically start up when a program attempts to connect to the 'net?

Lastly - Every time I go to the Mandrake Control Panel, it naturally asks me for the root password. This puts a little key icon into the panel, which is fine, except that next login, when I go to Control panel, it puts two there. And so on, each time cramming my panel up a little more. Is there a hidden option somewhere to stop this?

Answers to any of my many questions, or any general Gnome advice, would be most appreciated.

The only part I can help on is the X question

To stop X do
ctrl+alt+F2
this will put you in another command line console.
Login as root
ps aux
kill pid# of X

hmm. i believe you need to edit your inittab file. i'm in windows right now and can't remember exactly where it is, i think in slack it's /etc/inittab - but i'm not sure about other distros. anyway, you want to look for the line that says default runlevel, and change the 4 to a 3. this changes it from graphical logon (kdm or xdm) to standard logon. then when you reboot or logout it'll drop you out of X and back to command line.

what else...i'm not sure what dock to taskbar means, but you can set a lot of options for things in

/usr/lib/X11/xinit/

i haven't tried some of this myself, and it might be a little complicated to just jump into, but if you want your program (i'm going to use xclock, but it could be many things) to always be the same size and in the same location, edit the .Xdefaults file in your home directory (create one if it isn't there) to include the following settings:

Clock*Geometry: 20x20+10-10

here you could you oclock*geometry, and it would affect only oclock (not other members of the clock class, ie xclock etc). this means that whenever you start oclock, it will be 20x20 characters, located 10 pixels to the right, and 10 pixels from the bottom of the screen (+0+0 would be top left corner -0-0 would be bottom right etc).

if you want your oclock to always stay on the same place, and always be on top, you can add the following line to .gnomerc

Style "Clock" Sticky, StaysOnTop


i'll put my disclaimer again, i haven't tried some of this myself, and i'm not sure what 'dock to taskbar' does, so this might not be what you're looking for. still, knowing how to customize your desktop environment yourself is better than relying on a gnome gui to do it for you. there are lots of options available, try playing around with xterm - typing man xterm should list many of them. here's a link to everything you would like to know about X

http://www.linux-tutorial.info/cgi-b....pl?98&0&0&0&3

alright, now that i've given you enough information to gag you, i'll wish you luck and leave it at that!

I assume, you're using Gnome 2.2? Then, there is not alignment yet, but there will be in Gnome 2.4

Don't know about the floppy. Maybe that's because the folder is called /floppy instead of /Floppy ?

Concerning Kppp: You might have it running while you logged out of Gnome, now it's restarted whenever you log in. Shut it down and log out. If that doesn't work, try Applications -> Desktop-Options -> Complex -> Session. If Kppp is listed, you gotta get rid of it.

And Kppp is probably shown in this little window because you didn't activate a notification area (-> the place where your clock in windows is, forgot the name of it ). Right-Click on a panel -> Add to panel -> tools or similar -> Notification area.

Have fun!

Cor. Um, I might wait until I'm around a group of friends who can fix my inevitable failure before I try all that... thanks though.

Bah. Oh well.

I think you may be right on the first part of that, but for the second part it turns out that the 'notification area' was one of my other problems... this is where the multiple key icons kept appearing (and Kppp didn't). It's not such a big deal though (thanks for the suggestion).