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. 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 which will output graphical.target To by default stop init prior to X startup, do # systemctl set-default multi-user.default 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. > 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. 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. Other distros control it someplace I never seem to be able to locate. 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. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/