I need some help on the way to get my Slackware 8.1 to boot straight into a GUI. and wgen i use the command startx... the gui i get is crap... i would like some help on getting it to go into either KDE , Gnome or fluxbox (they are all installed) and also a graphical login :-)

thanks.

Luke.

You probably need to run xf86config to configure X windows for your monitor, video card and etc.....



Peace,
Whitehat

Reconfigure X first with xf86config to put in your correct settings for your hardware.

Then simply edit your /etc/inittab file and change it to runlevel 4 instead of 3 to boot into X at startup.

i can startx .
i want to know how to boot into a gui though... my X works
i want to know how to go into either KDE , Gnome or fluxbox (they are all installed) and also a graphical login :-) because my window manager by default isnt very nice :-)

ta tricky

this is for slack 9.0-9.1, but I assume it is the same:

the easiest and quickest way would be to boot to runlevel 4 which runs kdm, gdm, or xdm in a gui that has a menu to select your session manager. edit inittab (on my sys line 24) "id:3:initdefault:" to "id:4:initdefault" in the default runlevel section. personally I like to make a soft link (ln -s) in my home dir .xinitrc -> xinitrc.gnome (ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.gnome ~/.xinitrc). look in /etc/X11/xinit, these are the scripts that startx calls to run the session manager. when you have a .xinitrc in your home, startx will look for this first and run it (if it doesn't find it it will look for /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc next which would be the global default). just switching the soft link around to the other scripts is fairly quick and easy. I don't like runlevel 4 because you kind of get trapped in a gui. I hope this is correct, if I am wrong please correct me.

oh ya, to try runlevel 4 out temporarily run: "telinit 4"

Yeah, it looks real slick to have a graphical login, but if you ever have any trouble then you are stuck in a loop where you can neither logout or boot. If you're going to set default to runlevel 4, be sure you have a rescur disk like tomsrtbt so you can boot wiht that and change /etc/inittab to runlevel 3 again. The ONLY times I have ever crashed Linux has been as a result of bad configuration of X. ext2fs will recover, maybe once or twice, but after that... Speaking of that, xf86config is the best utility for configuration of x. If you run xf86cfg or xfree86setup, they may produce an incomplete XF86Config file. If the mouse is not working, then there you are without even being able to use CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill X. This means powerbutton and damaged file system. If you use reiser file system you'll have better chances of recovering. I'd much rather type startx each time than have to reistall and configure a system.

->gnashley
Actually, if you find yourself in trouble, you can always boot into single-user mode by launching "linux single" at lilo/grub prompt (assuming "linux" is your boot entry label)

To change from window manager run xwmconfig and choose the one you want. If you are already in X you'll need to restart X in order for the change to take effect.