I searched for this topic but I never quite got the answer I was looking for but I'd appreciate it if anyone addressed my problem. thanks.

Well I'm currently running Red Hat 9 on a slow computer. The default GUI Desktop for RedHat 9 is Gnome, however Gnome causes my computer to run very slowly and I managed to succesfully install Fluxbox. However I want Fluxbox to run indepedently after startup and not under the the support of Gnome because Gnome drains my resources too rapidly.

Since Fluxbox will run on the X server, I figured the first step would be to have the computer load xdm instead of gdm at startup but I don't know how to do that.

After xdm, there'd have to be some files it looked at to know which desktop/window manager to start. but I don't know which files

Thanks.

How are you running Fluxbox atm? You say 'under the support of Gnome' but you cant have two window managers running at once.
Maybe this is Gnome's ability to switch just window manager I think I've heard of, or maybe you're just noticing the Gtk libraries being cached when you start gnome, and then they remained cached for speed when you switch to Fluxbox.

Actually when I try to run it in Gnome I get a cannot run, something else is using display 0.0 or something similar as I read in the error message from the Command-line that's why I want it to run on the X server instead

Have a look at /etc/X11/prefdm. If you understand shell script you should be able to load xdm by default. And xdm uses ~/.xsession I think.

thank you

i start x with kdm, but then from that i just log in and i have it set so it remembers which manager i logged into last (ususally window maker) but you can choose diff ones, it should be able to start fluxbox however i have never used it, you can start kdm at boot by adding it to /etc/inittab (soupposidly that's how gdm and xdm start as well but i dont really know...)

it's not Gnome that causes the problem. the GUI in redhat 9 is resource intensive and runs slow unless you have at least 1 gig of ram installed. i won't upgrade to 9 for this reason. i don't use the GUI much anyway but it seems a waste to upgrade .

1 gig of RAM? WTF?! I have a 1gig PIII laptop w/ 512 of RAM and GNOME, Fluxbox, and KDE run just fine. Here's my output from nice top.




15:01:30 up 5:16, 2 users, load average: 0.46, 0.43, 0.24
60 processes: 59 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 6.8% user 3.2% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 90.0% idle
Mem: 513768k av, 499336k used, 14432k free, 0k shrd, 138368k buff
227988k actv, 59652k in_d, 31232k in_c
Swap: 530104k av, 8236k used, 521868k free 138172k cached

That's w/ KFind, Mozila Mail, 2 shells open, Mozilla Download Manager, 3 Mozila windows, and KWiFi manager running in KDE. You must have insanely high standards. I have noticed NO difference between Redhat 9 and 8. And if you try Fluxbox (my fav), the GUI screams.