I've been reading around for a bit now and there seems to be many responses to the idea of kdm causing issues with startup and shutdown but this doesn't relate to my query. I've had a thought that since I only ever use my laptop running a single session of X. But for what reason would I want kdm running. Personally, I was wondering about removing it. My question comes before the silly deed. (Which will most likely be attempted anyway)
Is it a simple feasable idea or are there sesible reasons to retaining kdm as a dormant process?

Instead of doing something like removing it, kill the running process. I think you will find it logs you out of the GUI really fast... I use that in my lab sometimes to get stragglers out the door quicker. It is a bit harsh. I think it kills all processes spawned by kdm or gdm (GNOME).

No need to get rid of this. If it is stagnant it will be swapped out if the RAM is needed for more important things.

I am aware of what happens when the process is killed, I tried this one already
I was more interested in the idea that if it is only used to control login sessions and if I only ever use 1 login session, is there a way around it. In essance, I am just messing with things.
I guess the question is better summarised by asking " Is there another way of launching an X session without using an XDM (xdm,kdm,gdm for instance) "?

Presumably you have already considered booting to runlevel 3 (console login) and simply running startx?

I think a dm must be involved to get any of the nice windowing features.

Starting X can be fun. If you have two Linux boxes,
X -query ipaddress of other

will let you log in with a GUI on the other machine if XDMCP via tcp is enabled on the other machine in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf . That is in essence what my computer lab has.

Another is
X -broadcast
which hunts around for another machine.

X is a big topic
Try man X for details.

In response to odevans, I hadn't thought of that. Could simply put that into the startup scripts. But i'd have to find a work around for the automatic session login that works so nicely in removing any boot up questions.

In response to RobertP, X is a big topic and very kewl. I have a couple of boxes in here that I can mess with and have. But this idea just tweaked my interest. The DM is responsible for maintaining X and initiaing sessions. The reason i was considering removing it is that I only ever use the features ( and only a small sub-set of the availables ones at that ) once every time I boot my laptop. As the DM's provide a system for multiple login sessions over the period of uptime on a system, I thought that it could be considered pointless to be running one.

I think that the idea of setting the initial X constraints in a shell script and booting that from the profile could be interesting but research must be done on automatic logins. I know this can be done becuase there is an example of it on the slackware installation cd's. (Patrick faked the login sequence) So i could check there for a starting point.

I use a dirty trick to load X without logging in. Use runlevel 3, and add this to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file (change user to the username you want):

here's what i did:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?p=1935619

I used to boot to runlevel 3 and then have startx as last line in .bash_profile

hi gbonvehi... yeah, you (and others) actually helped me with something like this a year ago, before i ended-up compiling the autologin.c code instead... here's the link to that thread in case anyone runs into the same stuff i did back then:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=306462