[Techtalk] Extra display mode

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:40:25PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Gene Dolgner thought:
> Did not see this appear on the list, so I'm sending it again.  If you've
> seen it before, ignore it.
> 
> I installed Mandrake 8.0 a couple of months ago and after playing around
> with the OS for awhile, I got myself into a mode where after I reboot,
> the display pops up into a generic X mode (xdm maybe?) with one text
> window.  After I left-click and Exit this desktop, the Gnome login
> screen pops up, which is where I'd like to be.  I'm sure it's something
> I changed along the way, just don't know what.  Does anyone know how to
> get it to come right to the Gnome login after reboot?

Things to check...

Once you log out of Gnome, do you get the same behaviour or do you get
back to the Gnome login screen?  If it happens every time you log out,
then its something being called by /etc/inittab which handles logins at
consoles and stuff.

tail -3 /etc/inittab looks like this on my rh7.0 system:

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
# xdm is now a separate service
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

the program /etc/X11/prefdm gets run every time you log out from the
desktop.  This first tries to run /etc/sysconfig/autologin.  If that
fails, it looks for /etc/sysconfig/desktop to see what your favourite
desktop is (it expects GNOME, KDE, KDE2 or AnotherLevel.  My
/etc/sysconfig/desktop reads DESKTOP="KDE").  If it doesn't get anything
there, it goes looking for one of gdm, kdm or xdm in the $PATH.  If the
xdm type screen keeps appearing each time you log out, I'd be inclined to
look at some of those first.

If, OTOH, the xdm screen appears only once, then there's something else
going on (probably before /etc/inittab gets called) but I'm not really
sure where to look then.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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