Re: [gentoo-user] Feckless xdm not much of a manager

[Bill Longman <bill.longman@gmail.com>]

On 08/24/2010 08:36 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> In order to make progress on this thing, it's useful to be able to
> control the display manager.  My problem has been that going to /etc/init.d
> and commanding "./xdm stop" seems to work, but has no effect on KDE. 
> Manually killing kde (ps -ef | grep kde, etc) just starts another one. 
> I finally figured out that I have to find the 'kdm' process and kill
> that, then a logoff or Ctl_Alt_BS actually gets rid of X, so I can do
> things like
> "X -configure" and so on.

You ~should~ be able to log onto a console vty by using Ctrl-Alt-Fn
(where n=1-6). You can then log on from there and commence all manner of
Gentacular shelly goodness.

There's really no need to kill the display manager ever. In fact, you
can have more than one running at a time.

> Oddly, "./xdm start" worked fine, and was responsible for kdm being
> started.   But isn't it odd that the display "manager" has such weak
> control on its "subordinate"?  Big PITA for me.  

Yeah, that's just a semantic problem, really. The generic term is "xdm"
but depending upon your setup, you can plug in any display manager.