The biggest advantage that KDM has over XDM is the ability to choose which desktop to log in to.

Well, my friend is a writer -- a writer who absolutely hates WYSIWYG word processors (he tried out StarOffice [the parent of OpenOffice] for about an hour a few years ago and that was the end of that). He writes in vi, leaving a blank line between paragraphs, formats with nroff or troff and that's a done deal. Nothing fancy ("Don't need that stuff, dude!"). He knows the editors (he's better at regular expressions that I ever will be), uses nawk (doesn't like gawk, so we have Brian Kernighan's "real" awk).

He avoids fiddling with things, doesn't program (but is a shell whiz, which is, after all, programming). He had an original IBM PC (still does, sitting on shelf somewhere), hated it, hates Windows, doesn't like Mac and he's a happy camper with what he's got.

Getting the train of thought here? A basics guy who would look at you strangely if you tried to convince him to try anything different -- comfortable in his own skin and completely at ease with himself and what he does. I did get him to try AT&T's Documenters Workbench (he actually likes the Memorandum macros and sneaks one or two in occasionally -- "How do I do a table, dude?"). He likes Firefox and Thunderbird (but still uses mailx for some communications), does research on-line, but other than that... well, no, no interest whatsoever ("Fonts? What's wrong with Times? We don't need no stinkin' fonts.").

We're going to try the three GUI log in's (there is a Significant Other who prefers that sort of thing who does use OpenOffice and loves it) but I'll betcha that the one that will be acceptable (with a held nose) is going to be XDM, no fluff, couldn't care less about choosing desktops, "...just make sure the damn thing works and I don't have to screw around with it!". And this is one of the nicest people I have the pleasure of knowing, just don't be messin' around with his tools.

In many ways I sort of envy that, I'm sneaking up on the edge of my incompetence what with all the fluff. My machines are run level 3 and startx and I'm happy.

And, again, thanks to all for the help and advice.

Or uninstall the gdm package that you added as well as the kde-workspace package; then xdm is all that's available to rc.4.

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Oh, I already uninstalled GDM (and the library) from my machine -- really don't like GNOME all that much (like: at little less than KDE which I have given up on -- but I do install KDE and use some of the utilities, k3b for example). We'll put GDM on his, see what he thinks (actually, I already pretty much know what he's going to think: removepkg!).

Didn't think of uninstalling kde-workspace -- looked at the package log just now, looks like a lot of stuff goes (and I really don't want to analyze the entire thing for what might go that I might miss). Think I'll just wind up with commenting-out the "kde" stuff in /etc/rc.d/rc.4, that doesn't involve moving stuff around (and, now that I've done it, I think I'll remember what I did, eh?). Ought to be a fun couple of hours anyway.

Thanks for the thought.

The way I do it is to have
/etc/inittab:
and then /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers:
(Adding the vt7 prevents "respawning too fast" messages and the tendency for the display to flip flop between vt7 to vt8 each time it's restarted.)


Also, no reason why xdm can't be made a little prettier. I themed mine to match my desktop.

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