KDM crashes in runlevel 4

New Guy Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 5

I setup the system to start in runlevel 4, and I comment out XDM and GDM.

Everything works fine, the system boots up in runlevel 4, then it tries to start KDM.
KDM starts, the screen goes black, then after about a 30 seconds it crashes, and goes back to the startup, where I have to use tty6 to do anything.

strange thing is, I can start KDM if I login as root in tty6, or just run startx normally.
I think the problem is that KDM wont run unless it's executed by root, and /etc/rc.d/rc.4 runs before I can login as root (sort of defeats the purpose of runlevel 4 if I had to though)

anyway, how can I fix this problem?

thanks in advance.

Posted: Tue Jun 20, 2006 6:05 pm Post subject:

rc.4 should already be running kdm as root so that's unlikely to be the problem. maybe your edit (where you "comment out xdm and gdm") has messed it up somehow? check that you haven't missed a # somewhere, or put one where it shouldn't be!

do you have gdm (the gnome display manager)? unless you've installed this, you don't need to touch rc.4...it will run kdm just fine as is. (on the other hand, if for some reason you've installed both gdm and kdm, then you're right, you'll need to comment out the section pertaining to gdm if you want it to default to kdm).

if this is not the problem (i.e. rc.4 is fine) then i'm not sure what's happening. what do the logs say?