On Wednesday 12 August 2015 10:05:22 pm Felix Miata wrote: > Roy J. Tellason, Sr. composed on 2015-08-12 20:17 (UTC-0400): > > > I'm used to booting into a textmode console on my machines, and doing > > "startx" to get a GUI going. The default here seems to be to boot into > > the GUI, and I don't recall being offered a choice about that, either. > > I know how to go in and fiddle with inittab, but now I'm reading that > > this setup uses something else entirely, so I've gotta figure that one > > out too. I'm also used to being able to log in as root, and use a GUI as > > that user, and that hasn't worked out as well as I'd hoped either. At > > this point I can select a number of different desktop environments with > > the GUI login screen as a regular user, > > The user-friendly distros' installers all default to providing a GUI login > manager. Main exceptions I expect would be Gentoo and Slackware. I've never looked at Gentoo, basically because from what I've read it appears that it would be *way* more time-consuming. In terms of other choices, I picked Debian since an awful lot of what else was out there was derived from it. Now I'm not so sure of my choice. I *did* feel that it was a good idea to get acquainted with some distro that used a package manager, so Debian seemed the logical choice. > The old way of getting started without any GUI login manager for most distros > (Debian and its derivatives excepted) was through inittab setting something > other than 5 the default runlevel line. In distros that replaced sysvinit > with systemd (e.g. Jessie) the new default configuration for GUI login > manager is found thus: > > # systemctl get-default Wow. Typing systemctl by itself sure brings up a lot of stuff... :-) I guess I need to get acquainted with this bit of software now, as opposed to simply going in and editing a text config file in /etc like I'm used to doing. Lots of complications there... > which will output > > graphical.target It did. > To by default stop init prior to X startup, do > > # systemctl set-default multi-user.default I'll try that just before I'm ready to reboot the system next. Mostly I just leave it running... > However, as with sysvinit, as with all rpm distros with which I am familiar, > all the above can be disregarded, and yet not have X automatically start, > simply by including a 2 or a 3 on the kernel's cmdline in the bootloader > stanza you use. Debian and its derivatives (e.g. *buntu) using sysvinit > differed from rpm distros by including X autostart in runlevel 2 and not > defining any additional startups in runlevels 3-5. The bootloader is another issue. I'm used to LILO, not GRUB. So I have more to learn here, too. > > but logging into a text console as root and then doing startx I am stuck with > > Xfce, which I find limiting. > > When I've found myself up against failure of cmdline arguments to startx to > get the WM session I want, I start the GUI login manager (usually KDM3 or > TDM) and login selecting some other WM, which in some situations became the > new default used by startx after login manager shutdown. That's the part I'm not clear on at the moment, how I select which WM gets active when I startx... > In openSUSE, changing the system level default WM session defined for the > login manager has up to now at least been via /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager. That file doesn't seem to exist here. There's a /etc/sysctl.d directory, and a /etc/systemd directory, a lot of stuff to sort through. > Other distros control it someplace I never seem to be able to locate. That's one of the things that drives me nuts with regard to this stuff. Lots and lots of complications, and it's not apparent to me why they changed things to be that way, what the advantage is. > I know at some point in time, user-level control could be via ~/.dmrc specifying > something other than "default" from among the content of usr/share/xsessions. > I think user-level selection may be something alternatively available via > ~/.xinitrc, but I don't recall ever trying without tripping over other problems. Yup! Try looking at man systemd.directives which seems to refer mostly to a whole LOT of other man pages...! Almost 5000 lines worth, "contains 1621 entries in 14 sections, referring to 177 individual manual pages". Wow. So at this point I need to resolve getting it to boot the way I want it to, being able to select which WM I want, finding out why my printer won't duplex when it does from this laptop, and installing TDE when they get around to that new release. Among other things... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin