On Monday 06 August 2001 10:34 pm, John Gay wrote:
[snip]
> kdm, The KDE login. Similar to gdm, but not a well behaved, yet. It seems
> it does not reconise other dsktops or window managers. These must be added
> by hand. This is why I still use gdm, even though I only use KDE.
>
> One thing to watch for is, each of these conflict with the others, so you
> can only install one. apt-get installing task-kde does not cause any
> problems, but if you use dselect to install task-kde, it will try to remove
> gdm to install kdm. The advantage of using dselect is it will notify you of
[snip]
This brings up an install problem that I think it would be nice if the
package configuration system warned about (the xdm/kdm conflicts, also gdm I
suppose).
My tale of woe:
I'm running an x86 box, up-to-date woody, but with the kde stuff from
unstable (all 4 task packages, Version: 4:2.1.36). Originally I was using xdm
but decided to install kdm (actually kdm-krb Version: 4:2.2.0-0beta1-4). I
use apt-get as, to quote someone else on a mailing list, "dselect has a user
interface that scares small children". Suprisingly everything seemed ok at
first, despite the fact that I didn't remove xdm. On later inspection I found
in /var/log/xdm.log:
Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
and start again.
When reporting a problem related to a server crash, please send
the full server output, not just the last messages.
This can be found in the log file "/var/log/XFree86.".
Please report problems to submit@bugs.debian.org.
xdm error (pid 220): server unexpectedly died
xdm error (pid 220): Server for display :0 can't be started, session disabled
However, at first I didn't think to check anything like this. All worked ok
except that:
1. At the login screen Ctl-Alt-Fn didn't give me another virtual console (I
thought maybe this was just how kdm worked), and much worse
2. every once in a while the keyboard and mouse buttons would stop
responding. The kernel and X must have been alive because the mouse cursor
would move, but without a telnet/SSH connection that's about all you could do
with the both. Ctl-Alt-BS, Ctl-Alt-Fn and assorted other incantations did
nought. A reboot was required (long fsck's ensued).
IIRC, "apt-get remove xdm" was not sufficient (left the K??xdm links in
rc[0-6].d/ ?). It was necessary to use "apt-get --purge remove xdm" to get
everything alright. I admit I'm a little hazy about the exact actions that
did/didn't fix it (I was pretty frustrated), but the purge definitely fixed
it.
Anyway, I'll be the first to admit that this was pilot error. Nevertheless I
think it would be nice to at least warn people about this conflict during
package install. I suppose this might also affect the xdm and gdm packages.
However, in the overall scope of this packaging effort this is but a nit. I'd
like to thank Ivan for doing such a good (solo?) job on Debian-KDE. Qt is
GPL'd, and peace reigns in the Linux desktop world. Looking forward to 2.2
release!