It should be a simple matter but I just cannot figure it out. I installed Mandrake 10.1 with Gnome as default. Later I changed my mind and decided to use KDE instead. Now, everytime I login I have to manually select KDE, otherwise Mandrake defaults to Gnome. Is there a way in Mandrake 10.1 to simply set default to KDE ?

Thanks in advance

Chris

edit the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file and change what's in there to that should do the trick.

Thanks for quick response. I made the changes and it does work - as long as I use XDM as display manager for graphical login interface. I still have a problem though when I use KDM (which looks much better). For some reason it keep defaulting to Gnome. When I highlight the DM selection it shows "KDE" then "GNOME (previous)". I guess status "(previous)" makes it default. The weird thing is that the real "previous" was KDE, but somehow Mandreke does not update it. Is there any way to fix it?

Hmmm, dunno about that m8, normally the changes you made in /etc/sysconfig/desktop override all the rest.

will change to KDE and make it default.

Boby

isn't the switchdesk utility redhat/fedora specific?

I tried sitchdesk kde but mandrake does not seem to recognize this name/command. It may be that I am not running it from the right place - but it is not in /usr/sbin or /usr/bin directories where I'd think it'd normally be. As another data point, I noticed that although my login DM is KDM (at least according to Mandrake Control Center), it looks suspiciously like GNOME - the hourglass is the same. It may be that KDM looks similar but... If it was GNOME that could explain why I keep getting "GNOME (previous)" in my DM selection in Login box and why it keep defaulting to GNOME.

Anyways, easiest may be simply to reinstall Mandrake using KDE as default and avoid all this anguish. I haven't yet done too much work to it so it wouldn't be a disaster. It's clearly not optimal given such a small issue (but annoying nonetheless) but well...
Btw, is there a way to get ATI 9700 Pro to work other than running it using ATI Dev drivers (with these I get only 65K and 3D seems very very slow). I know, by now, that ati is by far the worst choice for graphic cards for Linux (in terms of drivers), but I'd appreciate any pointers to make it work better, if there are any ;>

Thanks

Chris

Yes, but I knew it exists in Mandrake too. But maybe it was only in older versions

Here is a link with the summary of RPM's on the Mandrake CD. It's there "switchdesk-1.7.1-13mdk.i586.rpm" . Maybe he has not installed it.

Boby

switchdesk does not appear to be a part of latest Mandrake distro (10.1 Community at least). The list from the website is from 2000. I checked all install CDs and this package was not there.

I fixed the issue by simply uninstalling GNOME from my system. The login then automatically defaulted to DEFAULT (previous) which turned out to be KDE - probably due to the edits I made earlier as per your advice. So it works fine now - I still don't know what happened but suspect that there must be yet another config file for KDM which had GNOME as default and was overriding other settings.

Thanks for all the help. I have one more question about ATI Radeaon but will post it separately.

Chris

Quite radical if you ask me, it would have been better if we had found what was cayusing this behavior.
Plus, removing gnome and all its libraries might cause problems in the future...
If you ever wanna use software that needs one of those you may have to reinstall the whole bunch again.

just wanted 2 say thanx,
switchdesk worked 4 me

thanx again